


The Three Captures of Doctor Liara T'Soni

by Damselbinder



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Damsels in Distress, Kidnapping, Multi, Non-Consensual Bondage, Rope Bondage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:21:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28731117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damselbinder/pseuds/Damselbinder
Summary: This is the first in a series of stories depicting the lovely Liara confronting three different abductions, at three stages in the Mass Effect series. This one is set during the events of Mass Effect 1, just as Liara and Shepard's romance begins to bud, and Liara is still very much working herself out.This is partly straight-up fanfiction, partly damsel-in-distress fetish stuff, so be warned,
Relationships: Female Shepard/Liara T'Soni
Kudos: 11





	1. Maiden, Part One

What did it mean to be both young and asari?

They were an ancient people. Before the salarians had mastered chemical rockets, the asari were building colonies on Thessia’s moons. Before the turians had mastered language, the asari had composed operas that lasted for days, holding their listeners in a state of transcendental, meditative rapture. While the humans were still competing for their world with _homo neanderthalis_ , the asari philosophized, melding the hardness of reason with the flow of the spirit in towering lyceums that had stood, and would stand, for hundreds of thousands of years. When the krogan were turning their world into a wasteland with primitive nuclear missiles, the asari were already mistresses of an interstellar civilisation.

But Liara T’Soni was not hundreds of thousands of years old. Liara had barely passed her first century. She could have been three times as old and still have been considered a young woman by asari standards. Perhaps, in the distant past, she would not have felt so strangely about her long youth; in the Flightless Epochs, when asari knew only asari, she would not have had anything to compare it to. But her people were not just aware of alien life: they embraced it, having become as cosmopolitan as they were powerful. So Liara could not help seeing herself as the aliens saw her. She was older than every human she had ever met. She was twice as old as the oldest salarian who had ever lived. They looked at her and saw the splendour, the might, the ageless perfection of the daughters of Thessia. They looked on her in awe, in envy, or they just felt intimidated. They didn’t know that when Liara looked upon the deathless towers, when she saw her race’s history measured in the way that humans measured the life-ages of their planet, or whenever she spoke to a matriarch and saw the centuries in their heavy eyes, she was just as intimidated herself. How could she possibly live up to all of that?

Liara knew what she was _meant_ to do. She was a ‘maiden’, the word her people used for someone in the first stage of adulthood. Maidens were expected to travel, to experience, to do whatever, and whomever, they thought best. They were meant to adventure, and then return to Thessia, or any of the asari’s dozens of thriving colony worlds and contribute to the greater whole of their people. That was the theory, anyway, and though the theory wasn’t utterly divorced from the practice too often – in Liara’s opinion – her people wasted their maidenhoods.

Desperate for adventure, they signed up with one of an ever-swelling glut of mercenary companies. Desperate for uniqueness, they spread themselves among the stars, among as many different races as they could. Desperate for stimulation, they flitted from one partner to another, spending decades having meaningless, consequence-free sex. But whatever Liara thought about other maidens, she too had felt urges akin to these. She sometimes felt her maidenhood as a hungry animal inside her, and though there was a part of her that would have preferred the life of a physicist or scholar, Liara had had to feed her animal. Compromising between the two sides of herself, she had become an archaeologist, chasing the dream of the ancient protheans – the prey for which her animal truly hungered - to dozens of worlds: chasing rumours, liberating relics from thieves and, best of all, rubbing her genius in the face of an endlessly harrumphing clique of judgemental matriarchs. It had given her intellect a vast field in which to run, as far and as fast as it liked. It kept her animal well fed, happy and sleepy. Now it had brought her to the _Normandy_ – and it had made her animal hungry for something else entirely.

Liara was quartered in the section adjacent to the _Normandy’s_ medical bay. She was very grateful to have her own space: the _Normandy_ was not a large ship, and space was at a premium at the best of times. But it did mean that whenever Liara needed to go to another part of the ship – even when she just needed to go to the toilet – she had to go through the infirmary. It meant constantly bumping into people, apologizing as she dodged around them, either exchanging human pleasantries to which Liara was not yet accustomed, or going silent as they waited for her intrusion to end. Thankfully, when she passed through this time Dr Chakwas and her patient ignored her. Liara, alas, was not able to do the same.

Dr Chakwas’ patient was average height for a female human, but that was almost the only thing about Commander Shepard that was unremarkable. She was feminine – or as Liara thought of it, ‘asari-shaped’ - strong and extremely fit. There was coiled, controlled tension to her figure that put Liara in mind of the _Normandy_ itself: both it and its commander looked fast standing still. She had quite small features, but they were sharp, and keen. Ignorant asari sometimes mocked the militaries of other powers as being composed of gormless grunts, but a single glance from Shepard let you know she was a woman of formidable intelligence. Her eyes were a sharp, exotic green, and the curled spirals of hair that grew from her scalp were bright red. She painted her lips black.

She was in the middle of a routine physical. Well. Perhaps not routine, exactly: Chakwas had insisted on keeping a more-than-usually watchful eye on Shepard since her encounter with the prothean beacon. But the procedure was routine, at least. When Liara walked past her, Shepard had just finished having her blood pressure tested. At the moment she caught sight of Liara, she was flexing her arm, making her taut musculature all the more evident. Liara noticed, noticed too that Shepard had taken off her shirt for the exam, baring her hard, defined abdominal muscles. She only realized that she was staring when Shepard flashed a smile at her, and Liara turned away quickly, the blue of her cheeks deepening as she flushed.

Turning away, Liara hurried out of the infirmary. She needed to go down to Commander Shepard’s cabin to talk to her about -  
  
\- wait a minute.  
  


“Ah, Commander,” Liara said, going back inside, “actually, if you have a spare moment, perhaps we could have a word.” She was trying to play off her absent-mindedness as coolly as possible. It was not working perfectly. “Ah, that is, if you’re not too busy…”  
“Not at all, Doctor T’Soni,” Chakwas said. “I’ve just finished with her.” She was older than Shepard, in what humans called ‘late middle-age’. She was younger than Liara, though. “Alright, Commander,” Chakwas said, wryly, “you can put your shirt back on now.”

Shepard hadn’t quite finished doing this by the time she was back on her feet.  
“What can I do for you?” she asked, inviting Liara to walk with her as she left the infirmary.  
“Uh, yes,” Liara said, following. “I was hoping to discuss something with you. I’m not sure it will prove to be of any particular significance, but I’ve been analysing some of the geth transmissions that your communications officer made available to me. Thank you for allowing that, by the way.”  
Shepard gave Liara a half-smile: sardonic, but fairly friendly.  
“You don’t have to thank me, Liara. It wasn’t a favour. You’re part of the team; I wouldn’t be much of a commander if I didn’t give you the tools you needed.”  
“Yes, I… suppose so.”

“So,” Shepard said, “what did you find?”  
“It’s about the geth,” Liara replied. “I thought it was strange – that they would be working with Saren. Perhaps even taking orders from him. We know so little about them, but I can’t imagine how they would have come to be his associates. Centuries of isolation behind the Perseus Veil, and then suddenly they emerge as the foot-soldiers of a turian Spectre? It’s bizarre. I decided to see if there was anything unusual about Saren’s geth. Anything that could give us some… kind of clue. That’s why I wanted to look at the communications we’d intercepted.”  
“That’s—"  
“At first, I didn’t have much to go on. The bulk of data we have about the geth is from their original uprising, and that was centuries ago. I asked Tali if she’d be able to get me anything more recent, but she was – well… she seemed a little reluctant to divulge anything. I don’t blame her, of course; I’m sure I was being indiscreet. I don’t doubt that she was following her government’s protocol.”  
“If—”  
“But the older data was still very interesting, Shepard. I expected the modern geth’s runtimes to be significantly more sophisticated than those indicated by the older data, but it was precisely the opposite. The ones we’ve been fighting are… dumbed down compared to their ancestors. I can’t imagine that they’d have degenerated naturally – well, not ‘naturally’, but you know what I mean – so, if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that it’s been done to them. Either by the geth themselves as a way of creating cheap-to-produce grunts, or by an outside agency.”  
“Maybe you should—"  
“It’s such a tragedy what happened with the geth, don’t you think? For the quarians first of all, of course, but after that for the rest of the galaxy. A form of sapient life so radically unlike any of the rest of us; one feels we’d have had so much to learn from each other. I’ve heard people say that synthetic life would inevitably seek to destroy its creators, but I’ve never been of that view. I’ve even heard some scholars suggest that the protheans were wiped out by their own equivalent of the geth, and while I agree that there is evidence that the protheans at least used highly sophisticated V.I., that doesn’t mean—”

She stopped herself. She’d talked Shepard’s ear off the entire way from the medical bay to her cabin, without stopping once.  
“Oh, goddess!” Liara covered her eyes with one hand. “I’m sorry, Shepard. I didn’t mean to… ramble like that. I’m so used to spending my time alone, I’ve not had much need for conversational filters. Sometimes I’ll talk to myself on a dig site for hours if – and I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”  
“You’re okay, Liara,” Shepard replied. “It was all important information. And it’s not as if I expect you to suddenly start acting and talking like a human.” What she didn’t say was that it was just pleasant to listen to Liara talk: her voice was silkily husky – a sort of aural equivalent of salted caramel.  
  
“You’re very accommodating,” Liara replied, sitting down on the opposite side of the cabin. “But I assure you, my babbling isn’t typical: other asari would find me just as irritating as you.”  
“I _don’t_ find you irritating.” Shepard smiled on one side of her mouth. “Listening to intelligent people talk about things they find interesting is usually pretty engaging.”  
“You’re too kind, Shepard,” Liara said. She saw that Shepard was looking at her very closely, and she found herself unable to break the mutual gaze. Neither could Shepard.

The commander had found, and found again whenever she looked at Liara, that the asari’s reputation for grace and beauty was, if anything, underselling it. But even by her race’s standards, Liara was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. She was about Shepard’s height, but much more slender: lissomly curvaceous. Her legs, clad in tight, black leather – or something like it – were long, and lithe. Her hips were slim, eliding into a trim, tight waist, before her torso swept dramatically upwards to her womanly, buxom chest, restrained by the rubbery material of her tight, green-and-white coat. Her skin was a deep, cool shade of blue, a texture somewhere between that of a human and that of a snake: soft, and smooth, but cool. She didn’t have hair, but a crest of rigid tendrils, which were slightly iridescent in Liara’s case, that put Shepard in mind of a woman emerging from the sea, sweeping her hair back. She had delicate, soft features, intelligent and prototypically feminine, with large, curious, astonishingly cobalt-coloured eyes. Her cheeks were dusted with symmetrical patterns of freckles, her lips dark purple. Sometimes, when she looked at Shepard, her cheeks approached a similar colour.

The two had not made a secret of their attraction to each other. Twice they had experienced unity – an intimate psychic connection that asari usually shared only with close family, or lovers. To Shepard, Liara was graceful, stately, intelligent and warm, in her people’s fashion. An intellectual, but an open and refreshingly forthright one – and yet soulful. Gentle-hearted. A little spiritual. To Liara, Shepard was dashing, brave, charismatic and exciting. A beautiful human with fiery red hair, captain of a mighty warship, wrapped up in the prothean enigma that Liara had chased her whole life. She was fascinating, commanding – _powerful_. Sometimes, Liara was shy of her feelings towards this human military commander, this _spectre_ , that she had known for only a couple of weeks. Sometimes she wanted to rip Shepard’s shirt off and run her tongue over her abs. It was a complicated mixture of emotions. And now Liara was alone in Shepard’s cabin.

“I should go.” Liara looked down at the ground as she stood up, feeling an almost burning sensation in her cheeks. “I hope the intelligence I gave you was useful, Shepard.”  
“Hey, slow down.” Shepard rose too, but she didn’t rush after Liara. She seemed never to rush, seemed always to be in control of herself. “What’s wrong?”  
“Nothing,” Liara said, quickly. She collected herself, said it again, more convincingly. “Really, there’s nothing wrong, certainly nothing serious. It’s just that I find myself… off-kilter. I say things I don’t mean, I ramble, I get embarrassed – and it’s nothing you’ve done. But – I’ve known you for such a short time, and yet I feel as though I can hardly catch my breath around you.”

Shepard came a little closer, but not too close. It was well-judged.  
“I sort of know what you mean. I know what we’re out here to do, I know that the mission comes first – but I probably spend more of my time than I should thinking about… you.”  
Liara felt a wave of tingles rushing up from her chest. She smiled, slowly.  
“That is… very flattering, Shepard,” she said. “I don’t know much about human pair-bonding rituals, but I suspect you’re being very patient with me.”  
“This is a strange situation for both of us,” Shepard replied. “Just because we’re… drawn to each other doesn’t mean one of us can’t walk away if it’s all a little much. And…”

  
Liara knew what the ‘and’ meant. The ‘and’ was her mother. Her mother whose greatness had loomed over Liara her whole life. Her mother who had, inexplicably, joined with Saren Arterius. Her mother whom Liara had watched die. An asari life was a long one in which to grieve.  
“I don’t want to walk away,” Liara said. “I don’t fully understand… this. But I don’t wish to abandon it. When one lives for a thousand years, it can make one feel like there are always second chances. I already know that isn’t always the case. I want to explore this, Shepard, if you do as well.”  
“I do,” Shepard said.  
“I’m glad. Alright,” Liara said, beginning to move towards the door, “I really ought to get back to work. But thank you for listening to me rant. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for… being so kind to me when mother passed.”  
“Well thank you for throwing yourself into extreme danger, constantly, with no duty or expectation that you should have to, just because you think it’s the right thing to do.”  
Liara laughed.  
“Alright. When you put it like that, I suppose I do sound quite impressive.” She walked out, acquiring the distinct impression that Shepard was looking at her ass.  
__________________________________________________________________________________

About a day after Liara and Shepard’s conversation, the _Normandy_ put in for refuelling at a free port just inside the lines of what was generally considered council space. It was a space station, quite a large one, owned by the Vol Protectorate, designed to facilitate trading between the volus and the systems that lay outside of council space. For this reason, its permanent population – about four thousand – was pretty diverse. But it didn’t have the scummy reputation of places like Omega: the volus were efficient, if nothing else, and corruption and crime were barriers to efficiency. And if there was major trouble, there always seemed to be a turian cruiser or two patrolling nearby.

Shepard authorised shore leave for about half of the crew, leaving Navigator Pressly in command of the _Normandy_ in her absence. The crew left in staggered drips and drabs, until Shepard herself left with a small party once the others had disembarked. Surprise of surprises, Liara happened to end up in this party.

“It’s hardly a tourist spot,” Liara said. She was reading information from a traveller’s guide she’d downloaded to her pad, idly browsing through the information with skilful, delicate fingers. “There are bars and restaurants, but nothing particularly celebrated. There’s one that specializes in serving human drinks, though.”  
“Oh yeah? What’s it called?” Shepard asked.  
“Um… ‘Texas Nuevo Ranchero Pina Colada du Surf ‘n’ Turf.’” She blinked. “I… have no idea what that means.”  
“Doesn’t matter what it means.” He had been silent for so long that Liara and Shepard had almost forgotten that he was there, but they had been joined by a large, scaly, heavily armoured, two-hundred-kilogram third wheel. “Human food is disgusting. In fact, it tastes exactly like batarian food – which is also disgusting, by the way - only left out in the sun for a week before they let you eat it.”

This third member of their group was Urdnot Wrex, a krogan mercenary. From the way he kept grinning at them, Liara had the funny feeling that he had come with them entirely to frustrate their efforts to spend time together.  
“How long is this going to take?” He stomped to the chamber’s intercom, mashed the call button with his impressive krogan fist.  
“… Yes? What do you want?” Even freed from the wheezing of a pressure suit, the volus’ voice was bored, and weary. Shepard was put in mind of Droopy Dawg.  
  
“I want out of this tin can,” Wrex grunted. “And since the only thing keeping me from just busting through this door is _courtesy_ , I think you’d better look favourably on my request.”  
“Sir,” the administrator replied, lazily, “the decontamination procedure takes as long as it takes. You’ll just have to wait.”  
“Don’t give me that. I’ve been around a lot longer than you, you jumped-up little troll, and I’ve seen tech seven generations older than the one you guys are using that can decontaminate an entire krogan battle unit in less than _half_ the time. Why, I oughta…”

As Shepard tried to get Wrex to show some patience, it occurred for the first time to Liara just how old Wrex was. Krogan lived even longer than asari, and Wrex was already at an age where a matriarch would have been in her dotage. Even among the asari themselves, matriarchs were viewed with reverence as esteemed, authoritative wise-women, carrying great weight even in the pure democracy of asari society. Yet though Wrex was clearly old, and jaded, and probably quite different from how he’d been when he’d only been a hundred years old, Liara had the feeling that much of his personality had survived the ravages of time intact. She liked that thought. She liked the idea that impetuousness and passion did not belong only to youth. It made her able to accept that her affection for Shepard was more than just a symptom of her maidenly libido.

When they were finally released, Wrex stamped out, full of enthusiasm, but almost immediately his shoulders drooped with immense disappointment. It didn’t look interestingly scuzzy or dangerous, the kind of place where there was a strip club or pawn shop on every other corner and the black market was basically just… the market. Nor was it well run and upmarket enough that one could at least find quality goods and entertainment. It was just row after row of brand stores you could find in any port in council space, and the acrid smell of disinfectant hanging like a dull, official pall over everything. If Wrex had ever been a visitor of a particular miserable, rainy little island in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, and had ever been unfortunate enough to visit a motorway service station, he might very well have been tempted to make a comparison.

“Ugh. This place is depressing,” Wrex said. “I’m gonna go get hammered.”  
“Forgive me, Wrex,” Liara said, “but won’t liquor only make you feel _more_ depressed?”  
“That’s as may be,” Wrex replied, “but at least then I’ll be depressed… and drunk.” He began trudging off in the vague direction of what he hoped was a bar. He paused briefly to give his shipmates a cursory nod of respect. “Shepard,” he said. “Liara,” he added. He looked into middle distance. “Wrex.” He snorted. “Hehehehehehehe…”

“Right,” Shepard said. “Being captain has its privileges, but decent food isn’t one of them. I’m gonna see if I can find somewhere that’ll rustle me up a cheeseburger. Or the nearest volus analogue. Want to join me? If the food’s no good I’m sure the ambience’ll be to die for.”  
“I’d be happy to,” Liara replied. “But standing here now… you know, I think I’ve been here before.”  
“Oh?”  
“Yes, decades ago. I was still a child – I can’t have been more than twenty-five years old. Mother was… I can’t remember _what_ she was doing here, but it was something official. She took me – yes, that’s right! She took me to a bookshop, bought me a children’s compendium of alien mythology. I’m sure I still have it somewhere…” Suddenly she turned to Shepard, with a very serious expression on her face. “Shepard,” she said. “You must tell me something. I’ve never been around humans long enough for it to occur to me to ask.”  
“Uh… sure?” Liara’s countenance had become so grave that Shepard started to worry.  
“Tell me,” she asked, “is ‘Santa Claus’ a real person?” She was not necessarily delighted by Shepard’s response, which was to burst out laughing.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Shepard said, quickly composing herself, but unable to keep the smile from her face. “I just didn’t expect the words ‘Santa Claus’ ever to come out of your mouth.”  
“I- I’m sure I must have sounded very silly!” Liara said, cheeks again tending towards the fuchsia. “I know perfectly well that there isn’t a portly man magically delivering presents to children every Winter Solstice – I just wanted to know if the legend was based on anything historical.”  
Shepard tried to look every bit the scholarly human-culture expert that Liara wanted, but the corners of her mouth betrayed her.  
“Um… there was a real guy called St. Nicholas? That’s definitely where the story comes from. I don’t actually know what he did that got him remembered as the old guy with the red suit, though. But I’m just a spacer. Ashley was born on Earth. Maybe ask her?”  
“Ah, yes,” Liara said. “Maybe.” She made a mental note just to look it up on the extranet. Of every member of Shepard’s crew, Ashley was perhaps the only one that Liara didn’t like. “Forgive me, Shepard,” she said. “I’ve gone off on a tangent again. All I meant to say was that I want to look around for a little while, see if that shop’s still here. May I join you later?”  
“Of course,” Shepard said, touching Liara on the arm. At her gesture, she saw the slender asari tilt her head to the side, as if confused. It was simply that she’d never seen a human do what Shepard had just done, and it had caught her pleasantly off guard. She smiled at Shepard, unintentionally batting her eyelashes a little. This time it was Shepard’s turn to blush.

***  
  


There were eight levels available to visitors on Vol-Deepspace-019, four of which were devoted to commerce, one to the hangar deck, and one to immigration and administration. The four levels above that would not have been accessible for Liara or her companions, since they were kept at pressure conditions suitable only for volus. This division, and the station’s size, meant the population was quite spread out. For this reason, Liara didn’t encounter many other aliens on her wanderings: most of the others she saw were members of Shepard’s crew, looking vaguely bored, but pleased to be off-duty. She even saw Garrus and Tali sharing a table at a dextro-protein café, and waved to them. Tali waved back, while Garrus gave her a cool, tough-guy upwards-nod. He then dropped his biscuit into his coffee and swore loudly.

Liara found the halls of this place tinged very subtly with memory. Most of it was completely unfamiliar but, every once in a while, a sound or a smell would trigger something, even if it was not a full memory exactly. Just a feeling of familiarity. She followed that feeling, letting it guide her all the way to the place she sought as though that feeling were her mother’s hand, and she was still a little girl. It was nostalgic to remember her mother in this way, but it made her feel as though Benezia were still looming over her, even now.

She had an unpleasant thought. It was not that she was glad that Benezia was dead. If she lived to be three thousand years old Liara would never have been able to think that. But part of her wondered if her life would be better for Benezia’s absence, if she would never have been able to emerge from her mother’s shadow on her own. It was not a thought which came and went. It lodged itself into the forefront of Liara’s psyche and would not remove itself. She didn’t know what to do with it.

Her nostalgia took her all the way up to the top floor of the shared habitation section, and in fact took her to precisely the right spot. But the bookshop, already very much a novelty in volus culture by the time Liara had visited it as a child, had been gone for decades. In its place was a rather ropey looking botanist’s.  
“ _Khff…_ can I… _khff-hkk_ … help you… _chhkkh…_ ma’am?” wheezed the volus shopkeeper in a friendly sort of way.  
“Oh, I beg your pardon, I was wondering if—” Liara stopped herself. This person would have no interest in her phantom shop. “… That is, I was wondering if I could have one of those?” She indicated a relatively pretty flower-ish plant that Liara hoped was _meant_ to droop in the way that it was doing.  
“ _Khhff…_ sure... _khh-hhfkkfk_ … thing.” The shopkeeper picked up the plant, just beneath the petals, and handed it to Liara, putting their other hand out for the payment. As soon as Liara took the plant, however, the entire stalk gave way, and dropped off. The volus stared at the fallen stalk for a few seconds. They withdrew their other hand.  
Not knowing what else to do with it, Liara tucked the severed flower behind one of her ears. She caught sight of herself in a pane of glass, and she quite liked how it made her look. She hoped Shepard might agree. She wanted to appear pretty, which she didn’t often feel she particularly cared about. It was… nice.

She turned around to leave, and almost bumped straight into someone.  
“Oh, excuse me,” Liara said, but was met only with a surly growl, and the four-eyed face of a batarian.  
“Watch where you’re going,” they hissed, and would have shoved her aside, had Liara not rather deftly turned to show that she was carrying a sidearm.  
“You’re quite right,” she said. “That was very clumsy of me. And I wouldn’t want to be clumsy again, sir. Otherwise, you might _really_ get hurt.”  
The batarian tried to square up to Liara, but he couldn’t manage it. In her eyes and in her elegance he saw, for a moment, the cold face of the mightiest civilisation in the galaxy. He spat on the ground, and slunk away, as easily vanquished as any schoolyard bully.

Yet Liara was uneasy after the encounter. Even though she had been in battle many times now, she still found it difficult to be settled afterwards. This was supposed to be a safe, civilised port: she’d not expected to be accosted, however vainly. She began to move quite quickly, wanting to be back in the sight of the other members of the _Normandy_ ’s crew as soon as she could. She didn’t run, but she walked swiftly, her rapid steps echoing on the hard, steel floors.

“ _No_ ,” Liara thought, “ _they’re not echoing_.” She didn’t turn around, or increase her speed further, or give any indication that she was aware of the fact that she was not alone. But she made sure that she walked past one of the large observation windows, and as she turned the corner, she saw that she was being pursued. Two figures steadily traced her footsteps. The second she could not see clearly, but the first was obviously batarian.

As she rounded the corner, she slowly activated the communicator attached to her inner ear.  
“Shepard here,” came the answer.  
“I’m being followed,” Liara whispered. “I’m on level four, just passing into section… orange,” she said, noticing the markings on the walls. “At least two men. One of them is batarian. I’m not sure about the other.”  
“Keep trying to get back down to the lower levels,” Shepard said. “I’ll come up myself, but Garrus and Tali are closest. Where’s station security?”  
“I don’t see any. Shepard, I don’t see anyone.” The echoes of her pursuers were becoming increasingly conspicuous, and Liara was starting to get genuinely frightened. “There’s – hang on.” She saw someone else, someone between her and the elevator to the lower levels. It was another batarian. “I’ve been cut off.”  
“We’re coming to get you, Liara. Just hold tight.”  
“I can – I can fight them,” Liara said, suddenly embarrassed by her fear.  
“I’m sure you can, but you’re outnumbered. Don’t do anything rash.” She thought for a moment. “Can you get to somewhere with narrow access? A chokepoint?”  
Liara scanned around, her fingers tapping against the holster of her pistol.  
“Yes!” she said, finding a narrow corridor on her left. “It’s a dead end,” she added, peeking round the corner.  
“Then back yourself against it. If it’s a narrow space you’ll be able to hold them off until we get there.”  
“Okay.” Liara did as she was told. “Shepard,” she said, swallowing, “they’re batarians. Batarians… _take_ people. They—”  
“That’s not happening,” Shepard said. “No-one is taking you, Liara. Garrus’ll be there to tear them a new one before anything happens. I promise.”  
“Alright, Shepard,” Liara said. “I – I trust you.”

She backed herself as tightly against the wall as she could, and she focused her mind. An ethereal, blue glow began to emanate from her body, and she felt her power surging to her fingertips. Liara was biotic, able to project attractive and repulsive energy fields – essentially able to create microgravity anomalies at will. Other races had biotics – but _all_ asari were biotic, and they tended to be the most powerful. And though she was young, Liara was already on the higher end of the scale – another legacy her mother had left to her.

She heard speech: a staccato language that Liara did not understand, but that she recognized as a batarian language. It was an attractive tongue – to a human ear it would have sounded a little like a mixture of Polish and Portuguese. She heard two voices speaking it, then a third – but the third was different. It used the same language, but more clumsily. If Liara was reading the intonation right, it sounded like a human man.  
“ _Not the Hegemony itself, then,_ ” Liara thought. “ _Either just some local colour… or a syndicate of some sort._ ”

Everything went silent. They obviously knew she was there. If she held her breath, she could hear one of them breathing through his mouth.  
“ _Please, Shepard_ ,” she thought. “ _Please come for me…_ ” Her hands were shaking. Suddenly it occurred to her that, though she was used to fighting with her biotics, it might be better to have her pistol drawn instead, and as she reached for it, her human assailant fired at her.

If it had been a bullet, Liara might not quite have been able to stop it. But it was moving just slowly enough that Liara was able to raise a barrier in time, and the projectile stopped in mid-air, before clattering to the ground. Lying there, it sparked and stuttered, displaying to Liara her stalkers’ intentions: it was a stun-shot.  
“ _They do mean to capture me!_ ”

But as frightening as this thought was, it did not make Liara tremble in terror. The certainty hardened Liara’s heart: she knew now, she was being pursued by would-be abductors, and she had to fight for her freedom, and her life. So, when one of the batarians emerged from cover enough to shoot her, Liara was ready. With a grand gesture, an essential ingredient to a biotic attack, she created an attractive field right in front of the batarian, yanking him in her direction. He was lifted into the air, a hazy blue field surrounding his body, his face frozen in shock. Then, just as he reached the epicentre of the gravity field, Liara reversed the charge, altering the type of field that she had created, and throwing him backwards. The ‘window’ he hit was not made of glass, but of a special alloy that turned transparent when electrified. He did not crack the window, therefore; but he certainly dented it.

The other two were much more cautious now. Liara could not use biotic attacks continuously, so she did draw her pistol now, occasionally shooting to keep her assailants from daring to peek round at her. She heard them talking in the batarian dialect again, and Liara cursed herself for not having bothered to pick up its basics. Still, their cadence implied decision, so Liara was not altogether taken by surprise when one of them emerged to attack her. It was the human, but this time he didn’t even get the chance to raise his weapon. He found his body seizing up, and growing weightless, as he floated up towards the ceiling. Completely exposed, he had no way of defending himself when Liara hit him with another burst of her biotic power. The two fields interacted to devastating effect, sending him in a wild spin that slammed him so hard into the ground that his skull fractured in two places. Even for an asari, it was an impressive feat. That is, _too_ impressive.

If Liara had understood the batarian dialect, she would have realized that her attack on the human was part of the plan, even if her biotic brutalizing of him had not been. For there was a weakness inherent to all biotics, regardless of species or advancement of implant: it just wasn’t possible to keep up an assault indefinitely. When the second batarian emerged, therefore, pointing his stun-gun directly at his target, he was smiling, for he knew – and so did Liara – that she would have no way of defending herself from it. He opened his mouth to grunt out some villainous taunt or other. Alas he was robbed of the chance to pronounce it – by a high velocity round travelling directly through his skull. He twitched, coughed, and then fell dead on the ground.

“ _Scratch one!_ ”  
Liara recognized the voice, and let out a sigh of intense relief, leaning against the wall at her back. It was Garrus. He never missed a chance to show off his marksmanship, and Liara did not begrudge him another notch on his belt. She heard him walking towards the corridor she’d hidden in, and heard a lighter set of footsteps following behind: probably Tali’s. She saw Garrus emerging into her narrow line of sight, evidently admiring his handiwork.  
“Wow,” he said. “Are we sure Liara even needed a rescue? She messed these guys up pretty good.” He still had his back to Liara, so he hadn’t yet seen her. She moved forward a little to call out to him.  
“Ga—” was all she managed to get out, however, before a cold hand closed over her mouth. When Garrus, who thought he had heard something, turned in Liara’s direction, she had already vanished.

All that remained was a little red flower that had been knocked loose from her ear.  
***

It all happened far faster than Liara could react to. A hand covering her mouth, strength frighteningly superior to her own dragging her back, and the light of the station’s halls suddenly vanishing, as the ‘wall’ she’d thought she’d been leaning against had turned out to be a hatch, one which had opened – seemingly to swallow her – and then slammed shut again.

“MMPHHH!!” Liara cried out, as she belatedly realized what was happening. She tried to reach for her pistol, but it was snatched from its holster, and tossed far from her reach. She tried to use her biotics, but unseen hands had taking her arms and forced them behind her back. She tried to kick, but another pair of arms wrapped around her calves, held them fast. She tried to scream, but someone stuffed something soft into her mouth, and then yanked a piece of fabric between her fuchsia lips, gagging her silky voice before words could even rise from her throat.

Then she felt the cords. Strong, flexible, plastic cables, being whipped around her. In a heady, adrenaline soaked blur she felt them entwining, seizing, grasping, folding her arms parallel to each other in a neat little box, forcing them into place and binding them into one, her hands flapping uselessly as she tried and failed to move enough to use her biotics.  
“NHHHH! NNMMMPHHHHHHH!!” Liara screamed, a rising panic taking hold of her, her lovely eyes wide in shock and total, stunned disbelief, and still so confused, so off-guard. Ambushed – caught – bound! Her legs now were trapped too, cords being spun around her pretty calves so fast that she could hear them whipping through the air like they were being thrown, forcing her lower legs and her knees against each other, robbing her of movement, making her tight, leather trousers creak as the ropes dug into them; and hands all over her – grasping and clutching, tying her up, tying her up so tight and so fast, spinning her around like a delicate little butterfly, controlling her whole body so easily, and they’d been so ready for her – their ambush had worked perfectly, outwitting her, overmatching her taking her so fast and so completely – and they still bound her, framing her bosoms in cords as they twisted them around her chest, capturing her upper body, forcing her upper arms against the graceful curves of her back, and all she could do was whimper into her cruel, tight gag, as they so contemptuously and so crushingly overpowered the beautiful, cerulean maiden who had tumbled moaning into their grasp, writhing and bucking, wriggling her sinuous hips and her slim shoulders, thrusting out her womanly chest as she fought – helplessly, beautifully – against the binding cruelty of her captors, her skin hot, her eyes watering – oh they had her, they had her, they _had_ her…!

“GHHRRFFF!! GHHHRRFFF HLLLLLLHHHPP!” Liara called out to her allies again and again and again, but her pleas wouldn’t have pierced the hatch even if she hadn’t been gagged. It was dark, but when she looked down, she could see the hands pawing at her slim figure, hands that mocked her power and intellect and noble heritage, callously pulling her down from talented, intelligent asari biotic to moaning, wriggling, feminine captive; and still they entwined her willowishly curvy body with those awful cords, until in three humiliating pulses they pulled them tight, around her arms, chest, legs, and she heard a laugh in her ear and a cold hand on her neck, and a single word whispered to her, all the more savage for its playful, casual mockery of Liara’s capture and her sudden, total defeat:  
“ _Gotcha_.”

She was turned around, and in the low light she saw the silhouette of the one who had snatched her away from rescue at the last moment. The light was low, and she could barely see, but from the shape she at first thought her captor was asari, but their shape was too masculine – too much like a male human. But she was not given time even for her eyes to adjust, for her captors had prepared a new cruelty for her.

Her soft, cobalt eyes were covered with a simple, cloth blindfold, wrapped around her head and knotted so firmly that Liara cried out. Plunged into darkness, she wriggled even more desperately to try to get the blindfold off, blinded eyes darting from place to place as she followed each laugh, each mocking whisper. The hands all moved away from her, and suddenly it was like someone was toying with the gravity, for she lost all sense of place and orientation. She began to overbalance, and her limbs were tied so tight that she couldn’t right herself. She began to tumble forward, but those same cold hands that had stolen her caught her, and with a muffled gasp, Liara felt herself held against their hard, thin body, her bosoms pushing into their chest as she writhed.  
“No time to waste,” her captor said. Their voice was harmonically raspy, and immediately distinct from both human and asari. “She has allies. Let’s not lose anyone else.” They put their hand on Liara’s thigh.  
“MMPHH!!” Liara protested, thinking her captor was just taking advantage, but it was almost worse than she’d thought. “Mhh? Mhh! MHHH-GHHMMPHHH-NNMMHHHH!!” Her sight taken from her, she didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late, until she felt her breasts bouncing against her captive’s back, felt her feet dangling in the air, and felt her captor’s small, powerful hands on Liara’s legs and her tight, firm backside. They’d thrown Liara over her shoulder.  
“Come on!” they commanded. Then they started to run.

It was probably the most mortifying experience of Liara’s adult life. She was slung like a sack of flour over someone’s shoulder, being carried off as loot, bouncing against them, wriggling uselessly in tight, harsh bonds. She knew how her people were prized for their beauty, and like a beautiful treasure burgled in the night from a rich woman’s house she’d just been – _taken_. Some ropes. A gag between her lips. A piece of cloth over her eyes.  
“ _That… that was all it took…!_ ” Liara thought. “ _How… simple to subdue me…_ ”

She heard rapid footsteps behind her and gauged from the noise that there were probably three people following the person carrying her. Since the light didn’t appear to change, she guessed that they were still in the station’s hidden passages: some sort of service tunnels or maintenance shafts. For five awful minutes they ran, silently, the only sounds being the echoed footsteps, the gagged moans of the bound asari, and her heavy, frightened heartbeat.

When at last they did emerge into more light, Liara immediately started thrashing and crying out more loudly, hoping that in an open area she would draw more attention.  
“There’s no-one to hear you, asari,” Liara’s captor said. There was an increase in ambient mechanical noise, and they had to speak up more. Liara was able to guess, therefore, that they were female. “Gragan!” she shouted, a little ‘click’ beforehand indicating that she was probably speaking over intercom. “Start the _Shuyu_ ’s engines up. We’re going to be leaving in a hurry!”  
“Nmmphhh! Nghghhh!!” Liara protested, knowing that if they got her to their ship and managed to flee, her comrades would probably never find her again. But even as she fought against her captor’s grip, she could hear something that sounded an awful lot like engine noise not too far from her. “ _Oh, goddess… we’re already in the hangar!_ ”

She felt her captor’s footsteps get heavier and heard her grunt a little more with the effort of carrying Liara. But she wasn’t tiring: she was just taking her up a ramp. They had already reached the _Shuyu_.  
“Come on, come on!” Liara’s captor shouted to her comrades, as they began to rush onto the ship, engines whining louder and more vigorously all the time.  
“NMMHHHHHPHHHHH!!” Liara cried, bucking so wildly that she actually managed to make her blindfold slip from one eye. She saw that they were indeed in one of the station’s hangar bay, though the sleek, white corvette into which she was being taken was the only ship in this section. She saw, now, that she’d guessed right: a batarian and two humans followed her, up a ramp into their ship. She saw, too, the woman who was carrying her – and finally understood.  
  
“Quiet, asari,” Liara’s captor hissed, her voice crackling. “I lost three men to capture you. One is dead. You don’t want to get on my bad side more than you already have.” Her skin was blue, but a much lighter, brighter blue than any asari ever was. She had dark eyes with such large pupils the whole eye almost looked black, and attractive patterns of scales on her face, her neck and her exposed, flat chest. Liara understood now why the woman’s figure had seemed a bit masculine to an asari eye: her species was reptilian, and just didn’t have mammary glands. She was, in fact, a drell.

The ramp closed, shutting captor and captive inside. The lights were low, the air dry, obviously to accommodate the needs of the _Shuyu’s_ captain. They had come into a small loading bay, without much cargo – except for a modest supply of weaponry.  
“Gragan,” the drell said. “Why aren’t we flying?”  
The voice on the other end was faint, but Liara overheard something about ‘station clearance’ and ‘lockdown’. She felt her stomach tighten in fearful hope – of course, Shepard would have elected the station’s authorities. They wouldn’t be able to leave!  
“Captain Glamis!” One of the batarians was looking at a monitor screen, and they didn’t seem happy. “Captain Glamis, we’ve got incoming!”  
“What do you mean we’ve got—”

There was a heavy crash. The whole ship juddered, and Glamis almost fell over. Still carrying Liara, she marched over to the monitor screen, grimacing.  
“What the hell was that? Is it station security? Since when do they fire missiles at ships in their own dock?!”  
“I – I don’t think they do,” her underling replied. “That wasn’t a missile – it was a _krogan_!”  
Beneath her gag, Liara grinned.

“AAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!” Wrex’s first tackle hadn’t been enough. So he just ran back to the airlock – which he’d also ‘persuaded’ open – and just charged again. Again the ship rocked – but this time there was a more substantial result. He heard something ‘pop’ – and the ship’s ramp began to descend. This was no good. Liara was young. She was clever, and talented. She could actually matter to someone. Moreover, he _liked_ her. She was soft and intellectual and all that boring asari stuff most of the time but, every once in a while, he saw a fierceness and a hunger in her that was, to him, distinctly krogan. When the ramp opened enough for him to see inside, he was looking forward to tearing apart anyone stupid enough to fight him head on. Unfortunately for him, they didn’t meet him head on – but with withering automatic weapons fire.

Liara’s abductors were astonished that he didn’t die within a few seconds of exposure to brutally heavy gunfire. He must have been bizarrely tough, even for a krogan. He was – but they didn’t know that Wrex was biotic too, and through gritted teeth he shielded himself with his powers. But eventually even these gave way, and he had to seek cover – but not before putting a few holes through one of his attackers with a blast from his shotgun. Still, it seemed as if the attack had been driven off – until _she_ arrived.

Perhaps with the exception of Saren Arterius himself, none of Commander Shepard’s opponents ever quite understood _why_ she was so deadly in battle. She was fit, sure, but any N7 or turian special forces soldier was as fit. She was an excellent shot, but you could have found specialists who exceeded her. She was a skilled biotic, but only by human standards. Her own crewman, Kaiden Alenko, was her match, biotically, and she was much weaker than Liara. And yet when she fought, her enemies fell. When they fired back, she was always out of the way before they had lined their shots up properly. Like a wasp dancing between raindrops, then, she covered the distance between the airlock and the _Shuyu_ , her shields not getting so much as a dent. One of the kidnappers she felled with a short burst of fire that hit him in the throat. The second she defeated by sending an electrical surge into his body armour: his shields shorted out, and backfired so badly that he was instantly electrocuted. The third Shepard did not kill, but she knocked him into a coma he wouldn’t wake up from for two days, seizing him with biotic force, and sending him sailing through the whole length of the _Shuyu’s_ cargo bay. She reached the ramp, and began to ascend it – until she saw what was within.

“Not a motion, human. Not a whisper. Not a twitch.” Glamis was holding Liara against her, a pistol pressed to her temple. The bound asari looked at Shepard with wet, fearful eyes, silently begging for aid.  
“Let me tell you how this is going to go down,” Shepard said. “You are going to hand her back to me. You are going to come down this ramp, calmly. You are going surrender to the authorities. Otherwise, I am going to kill you.”  
“No you won’t,” Glamis replied. “I’m flying out of here. Step off the ramp, or your asari gets it.”  
Shepard didn’t reply. She went very, very still. She, like Liara, knew that if these people were allowed to escape the chances of finding Liara would shrink precipitously. She glanced at Liara, and Liara nodded slightly. She understood. It was better to take the risk. Better to take the shot. And if it was for Liara, Shepard thought, she just wasn’t going to miss. And she wouldn’t have. But she didn’t fire. The Shuyu’s main cannons fired first.

Shepard’s life was probably saved by the fact that the explosion threw her back. The hangar immediately, disastrously began to depressurize, and she would have been sucked out if she hadn’t been thrown back. Even so she almost was anyway, only surviving by holding onto a heavy piece of machinery with her powers. But it was too late. The Shuyu’s ramp was closing, and Shepard couldn’t reach it.

As the wind howled around her, Shepard looked with anguish and real fear – an emotion she did not experience often – as she saw Liara being pulled back into the Shuyu’s hold. Shepard couldn’t hear her, but the blast had knocked Liara’s gag out of her mouth. She saw her mouthing the words, and they clutched tight around the commander’s heart.  
“ _Shepard_ ,” Liara mouthed, in a silent, passionate cry, “ _help me!_ ”  
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She would have been sucked out into the void if Wrex, so mighty and so heavy that the force of the venting atmosphere could not overpower him, had not dragged her away. She saw Liara disappearing into the cold, lonely night.

Inside, Liara fell to her knees. She felt cold fingers pull her gag back between her warm, smooth lips.

She did not resist.


	2. Maiden, Part 2

The Three Captures of Liara – Maiden, Part Two

When the ramp closed, and her comrades vanished from sight, Liara still believed they would save her. When the _Shuyu_ burst out of the volus station’s dock, only its kinetic barriers saving it from being sheared in two, Liara still believed that Joker would already have swung the _Normandy_ into the perfect position to cripple the corvette the second it emerged from spacedock. Even when she heard the familiar ‘shoop’ sound of a ship engaging its FTL drive, she was sure – even though it became less and less likely with every passing moment – that Shepard would come for her. But that hope took ever more effort to maintain.

“Mhh… mghhff…” Liara’s protests had lost much of their energy. No-one who cared could hear her. She still struggled, but her bonds refused to yield her freedom to her. Her upturned hands flexed and flapped uselessly about, trying to reach the knots that kept her arms confined. She kicked her legs out, rolling her slender hips in a serpentine motion that was more an expression of her frustration than it was a real attempt at freeing herself. Even if her legs, long, shapely and leather-clad, hadn’t been tied, she wouldn’t have been able to do much with them, for they were held in the sinewy, ironclad grip of the woman who had captured her. She was still draped over the drell’s shoulder, still her stolen, trussed-up prize.

The whole business had ended much too messily for Glamis to be absolutely satisfied with the results. She had lost three men, five if she’d included the two that she’d had to abandon on the volus station, and there was a sixth in such bad condition that Glamis was seriously considering just spacing him. Yet even before she began to consider the pecuniary rewards, she found the results of her venture to be quite satisfying. Feeling the asari’s pretty, curvy body against her, feeling just how trim she was beneath the tight fabric she wrapped herself in – it was starting to make the losses feel worth it already. In the corner of her eye, she saw the asari’s trim little leather-clad rump wiggling with such adorable vim. She lifted a hand to it to suppress the asari’s struggles, and found her delightfully soft.  
“Mhh-ngghhfhfhfff!” Liara moaned, writhing with momentarily renewed intensity, but met with an even tighter grip in reply.  
“Hush, asari,” Glamis said. “You don’t want me to get _mean_.”  
Liara shut her eyes, wishing that she could fight off just how much Glamis’ half-serious had intimidated her. But – she was just so frightened. And her fear mixed toxically with her shamefaced astonishment at her captive state, the humiliating embrace of those awful ropes that curled so intimately tight around her body, and the growing feeling that she was no longer being kidnapped: she had _been_ kidnapped.

She was taken down one deck, to the _Shuyu’s_ brig. Only now did Liara recognize, in some of the signage on the bulkheads and the layout of the corridors, that this was a hanar ship, a modern one, even though the stark, white design of its hull was not identifiably hanar, or drell, or anything else. Certainly, drell like Glamis often used hanar ships, since all drell now lived on Kahje, the hanar homeworld. They existed in what they called the ‘Compact’ – an arrangement between themselves and the hanar which was more code of honour than true obligation, in which the drell paid the hanar for rescuing them from their doomed homeworld with service, doing tasks that the jellyfish-like hanar could not do themselves. But how a criminal like Glamis could have come by a ship so advanced, Liara could not guess.

Liara was taken to the cell furthest from the entry to the brig. With sinewy strength, Glamis lifted Liara off her shoulder, and placed her lightly on her feet.  
“Nhhhgh!” Liara felt three-fingered hands closing around her upper arms, and though she began to struggle, when she looked into Glamis’ dark eyes, and saw how much taller she was, how much broader her shoulders, despite herself Liara went still, with a quiet, tremulous whimper.

“Do you know what I find so very appealing about capturing woman of your race?” Glamis said. “It’s the contrast. I always lose men when I have to snatch one of you. Asari teachers, asari musicians, asari actresses – it doesn’t matter. You’re all so dangerous. You’re all so _powerful_.” She reached past Liara, flicked a switch, and the brig’s hatch slipped open. “But once the dust has settled, and you feel the bonds close around your limbs, and your biotics are taken away from you and you’re carried off trussed and _writhing_ \- you just don’t know _what_ to do with yourselves.” She pulled Liara a little closer to her. “Humans scream,” Glamis said. “Turians bite. My people pray, or swallow a suicide pill if they’ve got one to hand. But asari?” She stroked Liara’s cheek, smiling as the asari shivered. “Asari go _limp._ ”

  
Glamis pushed Liara a small way into the cell, keeping hold of her so she didn’t fall.  
“I suppose you’re just so used to being strong. So used to being untouchable. So used to those awestruck gazes whenever one of you passes. You think of yourselves like your starships, don’t you? Like those glorious, star-shaped dreadnoughts. Gorgeous; mighty; enigmatic. Invincible. By the huntress, I’d like to see one of those things go down in flames! It’d be almost as much fun as slipping out of the shadows and clamping my hand over a soft asari mouth…”

Liara wanted to show some token resistance. To headbutt her captor, or knock her over, or spit at her – something. Anything. Anything to show that she wasn’t as powerless as Glamis seemed to think. It was so stupid, so petty, but Liara somehow felt as if the pride of her race were at stake. She wanted – at _least_ – to be dignified in her defiance. But she just didn’t have it in her. She felt – she felt paralyzed. Her bosom pushed against her tight coat with deep, heavy, rapid breaths. Her whole body quivered with useless adrenaline. When she thought about it, she realized that she had only been Glamis’ captive for about fifteen minutes. The shock, the disbelief, the terrifying disorientation – it was as fresh and as white-hot as it had been the moment that she’d first felt the ropes around her body. She couldn’t do anything but look up at her kidnapper, her eyes wide, frightened and glistening.

Glamis was obviously delighted by the sight. She made a face that looked to Liara like a wince or a grimace, but was a drell expression of a patronising amusement that Liara’s native tongue didn’t quite have a single word for. Humans called it ‘schadenfreude’.  
“You know,” Glamis said, “for an asari, you’re really quite… cute.” She gave Liara a playful ‘boop’ on the nose, laughing when the asari turned her head away, shamefaced, her brow crinkling in displeasure and what was _almost_ anger. “Are you _pouting_?” Glamis cackled, a raspy, polyphonic croaking sound that would have been pleasant in more pleasant circumstances. “Oh, now you must be _trying_ to be endearing. Well, it’s working…”

She put her hands on Liara’s slim, delicate waist, and pulled her closer.  
“Mnnhghh!” Liara protested, resenting every centimetre of space that Glamis invaded. Mnnghff… mh?” She was caught by surprise. Glamis’ face was very near hers, their noses almost touching. Since drell noses were flat, this meant they were very close indeed.  
“If it were up to me,” Glamis said, “I’d let you go. I have nothing against you, sweet asari. But I’m just the weapon. A weapon doesn’t decide when to fire, or at whom.”

  
Liara understood. In traditional drell ethics – though Glamis seemed to be appealing to them with a little irony – a person hired for a task was not morally responsible for it. An assassin, a hired thug – even a kidnapper, were not considered guilty for what they did in the name of others. But this meant, then, that Glamis was not some opportunistic slaver who had seen a pretty blue flower and offhandedly decided to pluck it. Someone had hired Glamis, and was obviously paying her very good money if she was willing to risk so much just to capture one asari archaeologist.

Fired by her fear and the desperate danger of her situation, Liara’s mind ran in a dozen directions trying to work out why she’d been targeted. Her knowledge about the protheans? Possible. Could some mad hanar – a race that widely considered the protheans to be their gods – want Liara’s discoveries about their vanished deities? No, that was absurd. They could have just waited for her to publish her next paper. Her association with Commander Shepard? Also possible, but Glamis had made no attempt to capture Shepard herself even when the commander had stepped onto the ramp of her ship. Scholarly rivalry? Very unlikely that her rivals would go _this_ far. Something to do with her mother? That was possible. Yes, that was very possible. Benezia had made many enemies over her long life and had many, many secrets. She had had a high place in the Thessian civil service, their intelligence services, had been privy to all their government’s highest secrets. It was conceivable they thought Liara might have some of those secrets, though she really and truly did not. Perhaps it was something more specific, something more recent. Something to do with the circumstances surrounding Benezia’s death.  
“ _Oh, goddess… could she have been hired by Saren Arterius?_ ” It could very well have been. Perhaps Benezia had been wrong, and Arterius had never received the information he’d sought on the Mu Relay from her. Perhaps the rogue spectre was hoping he could extract it from her daughter.

Liara was trying to find a likely answer to the mystery of her abduction as quickly as she could but, really, she did not need to rush. She would have plenty of time to turn the possibilities over in her mind in her cell. To provide her with this opportunity, Glamis spun her around, making sure her grip on Liara’s arms was aggressive, steely, making sure Liara could feel just how much stronger Glamis was than her, and then shoving her in the back.  
“Mhh-hmm? Mhh-ngghhhmMMM!!” Liara’s sinuous, leather-clad legs were tied too tightly to support her, and suddenly the asari found the deck rushing upwards at her. “MMPHHH!!” She landed hard on her front, not hurt, but stung by the impact. Stung by the coarse, brutal metaphor that Glamis had forced her into. Unable to detach her perception of herself and her race from the perceptions of other species, she could not help moaning in anguish at the disaster, the sensuous, scandalous wrongness of being both asari, and _fallen_.

She lay there, prone and felt the offended pride of her race as a heavy weight on her back. And not just of her race, but her ancestry: she could not imagine that Benezia, even as a maiden, would ever have allowed herself to be so swiftly and so overwhelmingly defeated.  
“Mnggf… mh... mhhngff…” Even the sounds of her own whimpers were poison in Liara’s ears. ‘ _I’m so weak,_ ’ each one seemed to say, and though Liara bitterly resented the thought, she could not help believing it. All trussed up on the cold ground, she could barely move, barely even struggle anymore. It took Liara a few seconds to work out that this wasn’t because she truly was weak – it was another restraint. There was a very faint, blue glow around her, and Liara realized that she was caught in a mass effect field, one projected from the bulkheads of her cell. Low power, but enough to keep her from really being able to move.

Liara heard the hatch slip shut. Its closing was quiet, but it locked with such a sharp, loud sound that Liara winced. Even if she loosed her bonds, now, she was trapped.  
“Enjoy your new quarters, Doctor T’Soni,” Glamis said, her voice buzzing even more harshly over the intercom. Through a small viewscreen mounted to the outside, the drell saw Liara’s eyes go so wide and so pretty as she tried to understand the significance of the fact that Glamis knew her name.  
“Captain Glamis.” A trill in her ear. It sounded like her batarian helmsman. “We’ve outrun the turian cruiser that was chasing us.”  
Glamis wasn’t pleased to be pulled away from watching her wriggling, whimpering captive, but business was business.  
“Good,” she said. Doubtless the turian captain had been scratching her head: they would not expect criminals to have access to a ship that could outpace a turian cruiser. She took one last glance at her captive – and then one more after that. It was difficult to resist. To Glamis, an asari was never more beautiful than when she was helpless.

Inside her cell, Liara lay still. for she knew full well now that she was no match for her restraints. Testing them only showed the ruinous extent of her weakness. But she couldn’t go slack either, couldn’t at least ease the tension on her limbs by relaxing them. It was like her body just didn’t understand the position it was in, like Glamis had been right, and an asari body couldn’t react to the truth of its defeat; so it just froze. She closed her eyes and hoped that her heart would stop pounding its panicked drumbeat against her chest. She hoped it, too, would understand, and accept Liara’s defeat.

No! No, she wouldn’t freeze! She wouldn’t be meek, wouldn’t just lie there and take it, she couldn’t! How dare she?! Garrus and Wrex and her valiant Shepard had risked their lives trying to save her. It was – it was like when she’d first met them, when she’d been trapped in a security field and Shepard had rescued her, then duelled and killed a krogan battlemaster while she’d cowered, exhausted and powerless. This time she was even more powerless, but still she had to fight even if it was pointless, just so she didn’t insult her comrades’ bravery.

Bound, gagged, and forced down by an invisible hand, Liara tried to fight as hard as the others would have, as hard as _Shepard_ would have. Against her shameful captivity she thrashed and bucked, the leather of her trousers and the rubber of her coat creaking and squeaking against the floor and the bonds tied with such vicious skill around Liara’s shapely limbs.

She writhed with impotent grace, her body pulsing and bucking with serpentine rhythm as she struggled, even though she knew it was in vain. She craned her neck to look over her shoulder, see if there was something – anything – in her cell that might give her some kind of advantage or opportunity. But she saw only herself, saw her legs lashed up in cord, saw her arms fixed together, boxed up and secured to keep Liara’s powers useless, her upturned hands flexing uselessly. It was agonisingly frustrating, like being locked in a steel box with no room even to breathe.  
“ _I just… I just can’t – I can’t – unhhh!! It’s so tight, I – can’t move, I can’t do anything!_ ” Sweltered with the humiliation of her bondage, and the heat of her thrashing, she threw back her head, straining every taut fibre of herself at once.  
“HHHHLLLLHHHP!” She cried, in forlorn, passionate dismay. “HHHHLLHHHP! SMMHHHH-WHHNN, HHHHLLLLHHHHP MHHHH!”

Her words echoed back off the hard walls, reverberating until one could not have told that they had even been an attempt at speech. When they fell silent, Liara did not raise another cry, but simply rested her forehead against the steel floor, panting and quivering.  
“ _Goddess… I’m so weak…_ ” she thought, as if confessing a sin. She could almost imagine the matriarchs towering over her, standing in a circle around this daughter of Thessia, so fair and so fallen. She could imagine their cold judgement of her, with the weight of long centuries lending authority to every word of castigation.  
“ _Vain fool!_ _To have flown so far on such pathetic little wings. Even a maiden should understand her limits. You should be staying on Thessia and following the path that your mother has laid for you not… chasing ancient ghosts. Do the protheans matter so much to you that you risk your life for a few forgotten tidbits about their music and their eating habits? Is it so important that you prove your theories correct? Or is it just a question of standing out from your sisters? The other races look on us in frothing, ravenous envy, yet you act as if being ‘just another asari’ were something shameful!_ ”

Liara had invented few of those words. She’d pieced together the criticism of teachers, mentors, advisers – even one or two from her mother. She’d magnified the solemnity of those that had criticized, and forgotten the ones who had encouraged, but most of it was real. Given that she had been kidnapped, and was bound hand and foot, it was difficult to find fault in even her harshest naysayers. _  
  
_ She tried not to wallow in these memories, to return her mind to the present, but the present had plenty of unpleasantness waiting for her. Liara ended up playing in her mind, over and over, that awful moment when she’d been caught, when Glamis’ hand had gone over her mouth and she’d been pulled away into the darkness, half a second at most before she’d have got Garrus’ attention. The others, she felt, wouldn’t have been so easily captured. Ashley, Kaidan and Garrus were battle-hardened. Tali was sly and agile. Wrex was immovable. Shepard was… just not the sort of person to whom this sort of thing happened. She was, in Liara’s mind, an invincible warrior, a champion – she had even been chosen, as though knighted with divine honours, by the protheans, whose beacon on Eden Prime had imprinted their knowledge onto her. She was the sort of person one could call a hero without the slightest irony.

She found Shepard’s face coming to her mind, her face the last time Liara had seen her, as she had watched Liara be taken from her. Liara had not thought about the nuances of this sight at the time. She’d been afraid for her own life, and for Shepard and Wrex’s when the hangar had started depressurising. But, reflecting on the memory, she realized that Shepard, whom at worst Liara had seen looking concerned or anxious, had been genuinely, personally distressed. Even frightened. It was awful, for Liara hated to imagine how she would feel in Shepard’s position, if someone she cared for were stolen from her as Liara had been. And yet it did show that Shepard cared for her, didn’t it?

It was a small comfort, but in the humiliation of her imprisonment she had little else to give her courage. She took it.  
______________________________________________________________________________

It was not a pleasant thing to be a batarian in council space. They had never been well thought of even before the Hegemony had broken diplomatic relations with the Council. Other races thought only of the bands of slavers and pirates, thought only of the cruelty and totalitarian propaganda of batarian government, reviled them for their smug, vicious xenophobia even as they recoiled at the mottled batarian skin and four black eyes.

So what was Egarn supposed to tell them? That he hated the Hegemony as much as anyone in ‘civilised’ space? That he thought his people had all but committed cultural _suicide_ by focusing on slavery as the defining element of their society? That his cousin, the one that turian sniper had killed, had all but press-ganged him into Glamis’ outfit? That he even thought the humans had been, more or less, in the right during the events of the Skyllian Blitz? What the hell would anyone care? He’d still ended up as a criminal, more or less. The volus’ turian thugs had still beaten him so badly his upper eyes were almost useless. He was still batarian.

When the door to his cell opened, Egarn’s eyes were still hurting so badly that he thought it was the turians coming back to finish him off. Only when she sat down in front of him did he clearly see it was a human maybe, with red fur on top of their scalp. Egarn found the human pretty repulsive – hair growing on something meant ‘mouldy, rotten’ in batarian aesthetics – but he liked the colour of their eyes. You never saw green on a batarian.

The human didn’t speak. She(?) stared at him for a bit, but if it was an attempt to psyche him out she wasn’t very committed to it. She looked away a few times, at the pad she was holding, at the stark white walls, at the chair to which Egarn was shackled. She was either being meticulous, or being vacant.  
“What do you want?” Egarn said, out of sheer impatience.  
“C’mon. That’s obvious, surely,” the human replied. “Your… group, gang, whatever you want to call it, kidnapped my friend. I want you to tell me where they’ve taken her.”  


Cornered, frightened, and in serious pain, Egarn’s only way of defending himself was reverting to type.  
“Shit on you, pink-skin!” he growled, not having quite grasped the idioms of English vulgarity. “You think I’d lower myself to helping one of _you_? Humans. Ha! Bunch of mewling little puppies in the big bad galaxy barking as loud as they can so that people pay attention to them. At least the turians had the sense to beat me. Why should I be afraid of _you_ if even they couldn’t get me to talk.”  
“I don’t want you to be afraid of me, Egarn,” Shepard said. “That’s your name, yeah? Egarn? Well, you’re right, there’s nothing I can do to you that station security hasn’t already done. In the time it’d take me to beat any information out of you, it’d probably already be useless.”   
She tented her fingers, sat back, apparently quite calm. To Egarn she seemed like a relatively young woman, but she had an intimidating, commanding presence.

  
“You have something I want,” Shepard said, “and I’m in a position to offer something in exchange.”  
“You? You’re human. This is a volus station.”  
“It’s still in council space,” Shepard replied. “I’m a Spectre, Egarn. I have much more negotiating power than anyone you’ve spoken to so far.”  
“ _You’re_ the human Spectre?” Egarn scoffed. “I don’t believe that for a second. A lie that stupid means you’ve got nothing to offer me! You just want your asari whore—”  
Without appearing to lose her composure, without raising her voice, without even moving in a way that particularly suggested violence, Shepard slapped Egarn in the face.

“Let me make myself as clear as possible,” Shepard said, as the batarian reeled. “There’s another man in the cell next to yours. I have access to the intelligence of the entire Spectre network. I have the most advanced vessel in the Alliance fleet at my command. You, I think, are my best option, but you’re not my only option.” She leaned forward. “I have a certain way of doing things. A… set of principles, I guess you could call it. It’s why I’m talking, instead of shouting. It’s why I slapped you when you insulted my friend, instead of knocking your teeth out. Now I believe in those principles. They’re important to me. But more important than L— than my friend’s life? I’m not sure, and Egarn, _you don’t want to test that_.”

Only now, in a slight quiver of a closed fist, did the green-eyed Spectre betray a hint of anything that she had not deliberately revealed. But by the time she spoke again, Shepard had mastered herself. “I know you’ve been mistreated by the security forces. I know you’re very frightened, and that you feel like you have to show strength. But I need you to stop grandstanding. To stop bullshitting. Speak, or don’t.”

Still stinging from the human’s open-handed rebuke, Egarn felt his pride bubble up, but then just like a bubble it popped under the slightest pressure. He sank back into his seat, unable to look the human in the eye.  
“I… what do you even have to offer me?” Egarn said, sounding more petulant adolescent than hardened criminal. “I’m going to jail one way or the other.”

Shepard picked up her pad, scrolled through for a particular file.  
“You’re right,” she said, “but there’s a bigger difference between ‘one way’ and ‘the other’ than I think you realize. As a citizen of the Hegemony you’re still entitled to a trial, to due process. But you’ll be treated as a foreign terrorist. The volus will be happy to hand you over to the turians, and the you’ll be packed off to a turian jail, and you may never see the light of day again. But as a citizen of, say… Irune…?”

Egarn jerked back harder than he had when Shepard had slapped him.  
“Wh- how- how do you know—”  
“How do I know that you’ve applied ten times on four different Council worlds for citizenship? I told you Egarn, I’m a Spectre. That sort of information is easy to come by. And as a citizen of a council world, you’ll still be sent to jail for what you did. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I could arrange for you to be sent to a Citadel penal colony. You’ll spend years there, sure, but not the rest of your life. And when you get out, you’ll have been given a formal education, if you ask for it. Qualifications. Nothing crazy, but enough to get you a job as engineer or freight pilot, or whatever. A free citizen, as deep into council space as you want. You don’t ever have to see the Hegemony again if you don’t want to.”  
“If I—”  
“If you help me. If I find my friend, alive, and unharmed.” She leaned in close, and Egarn thought she was going to slap him again, but she just looked at him. “If something’s happened to her, I’ll leave you to the dogs. If I get her back safe, I’ll testify in your defence if that’s what you want. So - what’s it going to be?”

As she watched Egarn consider, Shepard remained very still. Remained master of herself. But beneath her armour, her heart pounded. Her hard stomach was in knots. Her throat felt tight. At that moment she resented her position, her leadership. The responsibility was fine: she _wanted_ to be at the forefront of efforts to rescue Liara. But having to maintain her decisiveness and authority in front of her crew, to make it seem as if she were in total command of herself and the situation – that had never been more difficult.

She was, in her way, as frightened as Liara herself. It didn’t just feel like something had been taken from her, but that something had been taken _out_ of her. Thinking of Liara captive – bound, shackled, alone and afraid – helpless – it was difficult to remain composed with such thoughts in her mind. It wasn’t that she thought of Liara as weak, as the asari feared that she might, but the opposite: to Shepard, a mouse in a cage was not an offensive sight, but a panther in a cage was. Liara had a gentle pride to her, a quiet power and dignity that Shepard admired and found deeply attractive. Thinking of that dignity being so heinously offended by her abduction – it was infuriating, and sort of disgusting. So when Egarn _did_ start talking, it was as difficult for Shepard to mask her excitement as it had been for her to mask her fear.

“I can tell you where they’re going,” Egarn said, “but before I do there’s something you need to understand. Captain Glamis—”  
“The drell?”  
“Yeah, that’s right. She hired batarians for this job to make people think it was something it’s not. That we were just capturing your asari friend because she’s pretty and we could sell her into slavery, or whatever.”  
“Go on.”  
“She’s not what you think she is,” Egarn said. “She’s not a pirate, or a gangster, or anything like that. Her work is… sanctioned.”  
Shepard narrowed her eyes.  
“What do you mean, ‘sanctioned’?”  
  


“Good work, Captain Glamis. You will be well rewarded.”  
“Yes sir. Thank you, sir. _Shuyu_ out.” Glamis closed the transmission and left her quarters with a girlish smile on her face. Even now the words ‘good work’ still sent ripples of pleasure through her chest. She was audibly trilling – a sort of drell equivalent of a giggle – when she returned to her bridge.

Her officers nodded to her. She wasn’t a spit-and-polish type of captain, but one never knew when she’d be in a mood. It was safer to pay the respects, just in case.  
“Captain,” her helmsman said, standing briskly. “We just had a transmission from the _Cawdor_. They’ll be at our co-ordinates in the next few minutes.”  
“Good,” Glamis replied.

She moved to her command chair, but didn’t sit in it, just punching up the shipwide tannoy. “Now hear this, brothers and sisters,” she said, pleased by the sound of her voice echoing throughout the ship. “The _Cawdor_ is due to arrive any moment. Previously assigned personnel, prepare to transfer over.” She closed the tannoy. “Gragan, I’m leaving you in command. Make sure the turians find you, and then run like hell back into Hegemony space. By the time they catch up, you’ll be far out of their reach, and no-one will understand what happened.”  
“You got it, Captain,” Gragan said, the batarian taking the command station with great satisfaction.  
“One more thing,” Glamis said, “send somebody to get our guest, would you?”

* * *

“Ugh!” Twenty minutes of twisting, rubbing, squirming, and some impressive gymnastics of the tongue, and Liara had finally managed to push her gag out of her mouth. It would not help her escape, but at least she was a little more comfortable. A few hours had passed, now, and the doe-like panic had worn off somewhat. Liara was still frightened, and embarrassed, but she was capable of rational thought. But it was as little use to her as her voice. Thought was nothing, plans were nothing, without the capacity to act.

A glimmer of something at least vaguely like a course of action rose to her mind, however, when she heard a heavy, echoing clang resonating throughout the ship: it was the sound of the _Shuyu_ docking, perhaps with another ship.  
“ _They’re going to move me, then_ ,” Liara thought. If she was to have an opportunity, there would be no better one than this.

When the human entered her cell she tried as much as possible to size her up without looking she was sizing her up. She was moderately larger than the average human woman, and fit, but not exceptionally so. Presumably the human would release the mass effect field holding Liara down before moving her. If she tried to carry her as Glamis had done, then that wouldn’t do Liara much good – but if Liara’s assessment of her build was right, the human probably wasn’t strong enough to carry Liara comfortably for any distance. If she tried to make Liara move in front of her, holding her at gunpoint or something, then she’d have to untie Liara’s legs. If that happened, there would be some chance. If that happened, Liara thought, then she could _attack_.

“Stay still,” the human said. As Liara had predicted, she felt the pressure on her body relax – the mass effect field had been deactivated. The human knelt down, and for a moment Liara was worried that she wouldn’t be given her opportunity. The human flipped Liara over, tucked her arms under her thighs and waist, and began to try to lift her, seeming stronger than Liara had judged.   
“Stop – put me down!” Liara protested, and she tried, probably vainly, to wriggle away. In response, though, the human tried to lift her faster – which did not prove wise.

  
“AGHH!” she shouted, dropping Liara with a quiet thud on the deck. She clutched her back, having aggravated an old injury that had been intermittently troubling her for years. “Fuck…!” Glaring at Liara, she was about to try to pick her up again, but thought better of it at the last moment.  
“ _That’s it,_ ” Liara thought. “ _You can’t carry me with an injured back… just cut my legs free… come on_!”   
The human bent down, drew a small blade, and just as Liara had hoped, she swiftly cut the ropes that had been binding the asari’s legs. But for that blade, Liara would have tried immediately to kick the human in the face or the stomach. The moment, however, the moment the blade was sheathed again – no, better, just _as_ the human was sheathing it, so that she’d drop it and Liara would have the chance to cut her arms free. Then she’d have her biotics back. Then she could really fight back! A simple plan, maybe, but a reasonable one with Liara’s limited options, despite the risks. At least, was reasonable until the batarian walked in.

He was growling something in such a thick accent that neither the human nor Liara could understand it. He was much larger than the human, and he had his hand on his sidearm. At once Liara’s hopes were dashed, for with the two of them there was essentially no chance that an attempt at escape would work. She’d been beaten again, before the fight had even started.

“Up,” the batarian grunted. Liara would have obeyed, but it wasn’t easy getting up with her arms still tied. The human’s patience ran out, and she hauled Liara up to her feet.  
“Don’t give as any trouble, asari,” the human said, smirking with such un-earned self-satisfaction that, even though Liara knew it was wiser to stay silent, could not restrain her umbrage.  
“My _name_ ,” she said, “is Liara T’Soni. I am a citizen of the Asari Republic of Greater Thessia. This outrage will not be – _ahhhh!!_ ”

At least this blindfold, a sort of cushioned visor that clicked into place when the batarian fixed it over Liara’s eyes, was more comfortable than the last. But the darkness into which it cast her was more complete, and no amount of shaking and thrashing would remove it. The pride that Liara had found vanished in a moment, and when her two captors took her by her slim, bound arms, she went along with them quite obediently.

As they led her through the _Shuyu’s_ passageways, Liara struggled to keep up. The two had very different strides, and she kept tripping as they lurched her about. She heard them passing other members of the crew, and Liara cringed as they laughed and jeered and whistled at her. She flushed, and even behind her blindfold she squeezed her eyes shut.

“Wh-where are you taking me?” Liara asked, not really sure what answer she was expecting.  
“You haven’t quite got the hang of the ‘captive’ thing, have you _asari_?” the human said. “You go where you’re ordered. You do as you’re told. And unless you want us to knock you out and _drag_ you, you do it quietly.”  
“…I…” There was, Liara thought, some combination of words, some quip or insult or impressive statement of defiance that could give her some sense of her own strength: that it was only sealed by her bondage, not stolen or destroyed. But the words didn’t come.

She was on an alien vessel, thousands of light years from the world on which she was born. She’d been kidnapped, tied up, blindfolded, and was being marched along by two burly mercenaries who wouldn’t hesitate about hurting her if she resisted, even if she was valuable to them. She was helpless, and scared, and felt so terribly out of her depth, and she just wanted someone to come and end this nightmare and rescue her.

To her embarrassment Liara found these thoughts put her in mind of an old genre of fiction that had been popular some… two thousand years before Liara had been born. It was long dead now but had once been such a big business that there still remained some memory of it, the odd trope dotted here and there on the asari cultural landscape. It was a repeated pattern of romantic epic, of such paralytic formulaism that the name of the genre was a euphemism for ‘cliché’ in some asari languages, and even for ‘circle’ in some others.

There was always a justicar, a member of a real, and still minimally extant, order of asari enforcers dedicated to a rigid moral code and ascetic lifestyle. There was always some virginal maiden, fresh out of her first century. They would meet; the maiden would fall hopelessly in love; the justicar would be forced to reject the maiden’s affections because of her code; the maiden would then journey to a far-off world to forget the justicar, where she would either be kidnapped or forced into a marriage with a tyrannical matriarch-witch. The justicar would then somehow find out about the maiden’s straits – sometimes with the help of some comical familiar of the maiden, through a dream, or even through direct divine revelation from the goddess.

There would then be a rescue, always successful, and then either the justicar would be slain in the battle with the matriarch-witch and confess her love to the maiden with her dying breath; or the justicar would survive and then reject the maiden again with a suitably tragic speech, that always began with the words “O flower of Thessia… ”. It was… difficult to imagine that Thessia’s literary culture was not enriched by this genre’s absence. And yet Liara would have given much for one of these pompous justicars to ride in on a cloud of her own self-righteousness and whisk her away to safety. It was an image of such ludicrous bathos that it was actually a source of some comfort – not real enough to be painful by its absence. Had she allowed herself to imagine what, and whom, she really wanted, it would probably have made her cry.

Liara didn’t realize that she’d left the _Shuyu_ immediately. But the air on the _Cawdor_ was a little staler, and her steps felt a little lighter, and the hum of the place sounded different. More rattling. This, then, was an older ship than the sleek corvette Liara had been on before.  
“ _If anyone is coming after me,_ ” Liara thought, “ _they won’t be looking for_ this _ship_.” Rescue was growing an ever more distant possibility.

She was taken onto an elevator, brought down two, maybe three decks, then hauled out again and forced down yet another series of passageways. Blindfolded, Liara was so disoriented by this point that she wondered if her captors were just leading her around in a circle, either to confuse her as much as possible or just for the pleasure of tormenting her. But whatever cruelties her captors had in store for her, that wasn’t one of them, and she was, eventually, led into a cabin, or maybe the brig of this other ship. Her human guard, still resenting Liara for her renewed back pain, shoved her forward. Growing a little more used to this mistreatment, Liara didn’t fall over this time, but there were a pair of hands waiting for her all the same. They took her by her waist, and pulled her against a tall, wiry drell body.

“I hope my crew haven’t been too rough on you, Dr. T’Soni,” Glamis said. “You seem like such a… gentle creature.” She unclipped Liara’s blindfold, tossed it to the batarian. She revealed a stark, gunmetal-grey cabin that had even lower light than the _Shuyu._ “Ah-ah, none of that!”  
Liara had tried to headbutt her captor, but her head had barely even begun to move before Glamis had stopped her. She held Liara by the chin, her iron grip swiftly suppressing any resistance, a thumb stroking one of Liara’s smooth, blue cheeks.  
“D-damn you!” Humiliated and infuriated in equal measure, Liara fought against Glamis’ grasp, and again found her strength utterly wanting. “Why are you doing this to me?” Liara demanded. “Are you working for Saren Arterius? For the geth? A-are you just going to sell me into slavery? What do you _want_?!”

Glamis didn’t seem perturbed either by Liara’s resistance or her entreaties. She kept the same smug composure that seemed always etched on her face.  
“It’s not for me to tell you,” she eventually replied. “All I will say, Doctor T’Soni, is that you’ve been very, very clever for one so young. _Too_ clever.”  
“What do you mean?” Liara asked. “Is it something to do with my research?”  
“Yes, that’s probably for the best,” Glamis replied. It was such a strange reply that Liara wondered if either she or Glamis had had some sort of translation issue, until it became obvious that Glamis hadn’t been talking to her at all, but to one of her subordinates. ‘It was for the best’ for the batarian to jab a syringe into Liara’s slender, graceful neck.

Liara didn’t make a sound. But her mouth opened in a sharp, mute ‘oh!’, her cobalt eyes shot wide, and her body jerked so stiff that she actually stood up on her tiptoes. She felt the pressure of something forcing its way inside her, through a puncture so fine one would have struggled to see it with the naked eye. The pain passed immediately, for there was some kind of numbing agent actually on the needle itself. But as the pain fell away, so too did everything else.

It was like Liara was sitting in the control centre of her own mind, watching all the screens and consoles go black. Even though she’d been injected in the neck, the sensation of paralytic weakness started in her feet. It spread upwards, and Liara felt her calves and thighs relax, felt her knees shiver, then yield. Glamis’ hands quickly slipped to Liara’s upper arms to hold her, but Liara couldn’t even quite feel them. It felt more like she was floating.

The sensation continued travelling up Liara’s body, like she was watching a river roll uphill. It was cold, but strangely pleasant, like dipping into a plunge pool after a spa. Fear and struggle and panic were hot, and this coolness was relieving. At least, it was until it spread into Liara’s chest, and arms, and she felt her shoulders sink, felt her neck quivering and her head wavering, her vision growing dim.  
“Can’t… ooh…” Liara whimpered, yielding up the last vestiges of her strength. She was just so tired. Her eyelids were so heavy; being _awake_ was heavy, and Liara felt so very weak.

“That’s it, asari,” Glamis whispered. “Don’t fight it. You can’t fight it. You don’t _want_ to fight it. You just want to _sleep_.”  
“Nhhh…” Liara’s body surrendered to Glamis’ command. Her supple back arched one last time – and then she went limp. She fell forward against Glamis’ chest, and by the time her head was resting against her captor’s cold skin, her eyelids had already fallen shut with a delicate little flutter.

Yet Liara was still just barely clinging onto wakefulness when Glamis took her up into her arms. She could feel, then, as the drell’s thin fingers pressed into her leather-clad thighs, could feel her slim calves swinging to and fro as she was lifted. She felt Glamis’ arm curling around the middle of her back, felt her head dipping backward, her neck going taut as the weight of her head pulled on its fine, delicate musculature. She was, barely, cognizant enough to form one last thought: that never in her entire life had she felt so vulnerable. That thought, at last, defeated her. She passed out, with a long, sad, soft sigh; borne in her captor’s arms as a cerulean vision of fair, helpless maidenhood.

The drug put Liara out for about seven hours. By the time it started to wear off, the _Cawdor_ had already arrived at its terminus: a small station at rest in deep space, far from the usual travel lanes of the sector in which it hung. Liara’s first glimmer of reawakening came when the _Cawdor_ docked, but it was detectable only by a little crinkling of her eyebrows.

The next attempt came as Liara was being carried onto the station by two batarians. She awoke just enough to see one of them, and to realize that she was being carried, one holding her by the feet, the other by the arms, but she’d fainted again before they even noticed that she was awake.

The rest of Liara’s awakening happened in fits and starts, sometimes with only a few seconds’ gap between her eyes opening once and opening again, sometimes a few minutes. Sometimes she would hear voices, and see strange lights, and at one point she thought she saw Glamis kneeling, but it could have been another drell. It was only when they brought her into a large, white room, with lights so bright that it would have been painful for a drell to stand inside, that Liara managed to regain some sense of her circumstances.

But her eyes were still bleary, especially under the harsh lights, and her cognisance was still fragile. She was put on the floor, or… maybe a table? She couldn’t tell. There were people standing over her – batarians? No… drell. They were all drell. They were wearing blindfolds, or… maybe eye-shades. They were doing something to her… turning her over and… and untying her? Yes – they had unwound the cords from her arms.  
“ _Have… have I been rescued?_ ” Liara tried to lift one of her newly freed arms, but one of the drell forced it back down. Four hands took her, four hand flipped her back onto her front, and as Liara blinked in the heavy light, she saw the grim looks on the drell’s faces. No. They were not there to help her.

Suddenly there were hands all over her. Her chest, her arms, her stomach, her hips, her legs – cold, drell hands grasping and clutching at her, and in Liara’s drugged delirium she couldn’t tell what they were doing. She thought they were just… touching her.  
“Stop…” she demanded, but so softly that none of the drell even realized she had spoken,

They turned her over, then back over again, tugging and pulling at her, only very occasionally speaking to each other, and even then Liara caught very few words. At one point she definitively heard “Glamis”, then “Cawdor”, then what she thought might have been the drell word for ‘prothean’. After that it was just random bits of sentences: “this”; “flown”; “expensive”; “bright”; and, finally, “tube.”

Two of the drell lifted her, holding her under her arms, and dragging her towards where the triangular shape of the room reached its sharpest point. Liara wasn’t quite limp anymore, but she was still much too weak to resist them, let alone use her biotics.  
“Put me… nhh…” Liara shivered. Despite the bright, hot lights, she felt cold.

The drell dragged her to what looked like an exposed pipe in the middle of the floor, with a circumference just about wide enough for a person to stand inside if they kept their legs together. They lifted Liara’s feet so that she was within the radius of the ‘pipe’, then held her so that she was standing. The bottom was the same metal as the rest of the floor, but the sides felt fairly soft against the skin of Liara’s feet.  
“ _Wait,_ ” Liara thought. “ _My… skin…?_ ” Before she could contemplate this mystery, though, something more urgent drew her attention.

_SCHOOP!_

Around Liara’s body, the ‘pipe’ erupted upwards, forming a thick, sturdy, metal tube, divided into articulated segments. It rose to about two-thirds of the way up Liara’s torso, the circumference of the top of the tube parallel with the very middle of Liara’s bosom. The inner lining of it was all cushioned, and though Liara could have lifted herself out of it, it was small enough that, when her drell handlers released her, it kept her standing more-or-less straight. It rose so quickly over her that it blew a cold gust of air into Liara’s face, stirring her into a more complete wakefulness and awareness of her surroundings. She blinked, shook her head, and looked down in confusion at the tube into which she’d been placed. It was only then that she saw herself; only then that she realized what the drell had been doing to her. Liara’s freckles almost vanished beneath a fuschia blush so bright that it looked like it might spread to her whole body, and she actually cried out, when she saw that her captors had stripped her naked. Then, as she gaped, the lining of the tube inflated.

“UNNHH!” Liara gasped, as the tube transformed instantly into a prison. Sensors within the contraption sensed and responded to every contour, every groove, every line of her svelte, womanly figure, and inflated to exactly the right volume to bind her, to trap her. It pinned her arms tight against her sides, flattened her hands against her hips, compressed her long, slender blue legs against each other and forced the graceful curve of Liara’s back to go rigid, capturing her with ruthless conclusiveness.

Stunned by the completeness, tightness and contemptuous, mechanical swiftness of her bondage, Liara could only look down at herself, gaping. Within the tube, she could feel the wriggles of her naked body being completely suppressed, the cushioned interior of her prison rubbing intimately against every square inch of her fine, silky skin, until it felt not so much like Liara was struggling as that she was being caressed on all sides: her thighs, her midriff, her rear; the undersides of her breasts and the scarcely concealed buds hidden just below the top edge of the tube. It was overwhelming, and frighteningly intimate, and she couldn’t fully process it, so she just stared. She stared not only at the part of her that was bound but, almost worse, at the part that was not. The swell of her already voluptuous breasts was exaggerated by the compression around her chest, emphasizing her feminine beauty to an extent that would have verged on parody had Liara not been so astonishingly lovely. She was so transfixed by the sight of herself that she didn’t notice that there was someone standing in front of her.  
“Don’t look so sad, Doctor T’Soni,” Glamis said. “I think it suits you.”  
Liara looked up, just in time for Glamis to take a short strip of silver sealant tape, and slap it over Liara’s warm, soft mouth.

“MMPHHHHH!!” She – she couldn’t believe it. It was almost – no it _was_ worse than when she’d first been caught. She was – she – naked and held so tight, the gag over her lips and the tube and she was – the tube was so restrictive, _perfectly_ restrictive, like it had been made just for Liara; and she was naked, her breasts heaving and her shoulders pushed in so tight against her body and her cheeks blushing so hot – and Glamis’ black eyes dancing over her bosoms and shoulders – but it was like she could see inside too, see Liara’s body naked beneath this steel sleeve which had shackled her so utterly, so inescapably.

As the drug continued to release its hold on her, a needless hold now, Liara realized that the tube was not completely rigid, that as she struggled it would move with her, the articulated segments between each thick metal ring sliding, shifting and bending, to accommodate her vain attempts at resistance. It didn’t have to be that way: it could have held her still without difficulty. Liara felt as though her struggles themselves were only being displayed for Glamis’ pleasure. In the glassy mirror of the drell’s eyes, Liara could even see what Glamis saw: the way her breasts pushed with such vigorous intensity against their confines; the way her slender, silky, naked shoulders wriggled and squirmed; the way Liara threw her head from side to side with such anguished passion – there was something sensual in it, in her struggle against this shameful, steel embrace, in her helpless, gagged moans; a side of herself that Liara was not familiar enough with to control; the animal of her maidenhood forcing her to continue this humiliating, captive dance even though she saw how it delighted Glamis, even though she felt beads of sweat rolling between her breasts, and within the tube, which grew warmer and warmer the more Liara struggled, she felt sweat slipping down her navel, down her long legs, and between her hot thighs. But she couldn’t stop, couldn’t bear to be still, couldn’t bear to surrender, until eventually she just grew too tired to keep going, and she slumped forward, the tube letting her sag, the maiden panting, and whimpering, and quivering, subsumed in the heavy miasma of her own captivity.

“Get that out of your system, Dr. T’Soni?” Glamis flicked a switch near the bottom of the tube, and Liara was jerked up, her prison becoming straight and rigid, forcing her upright.  
“Mhh… mhh…” Liara couldn’t look at her captor anymore, casting her eyes down. She was ashamed of herself. Even if one of the others had been taken instead of her, she thought, Glamis would never have been able to get so deep under their skin as she had with Liara.

Glamis put her hands on Liara’s bare shoulders, delighting in the warmth of them, the softness of Liara’s skin, and the little mews that came from her gag when Glamis touched her.  
“Now, asari,” Glamis said, “I think you’re beginning to understand the appropriate… etiquette.” She reached out with both her thumbs, and traced the delicate, graceful lines of Liara’s collarbone. The cerulean maiden still wriggled a little, but not enough to disturb Glamis’ enjoyment. Just enough to make her look fetchingly helpless. Her hands went a little lower. Over Liara’s collar. Over her sternum. To the soft, yielding roundness of her beautiful, blue breasts…  
“Glamis!”

The captain turned. One of the other drell, in a long, forest green robe, had fixed her with cold eyes.  
“Enough of this,” she commanded. “You did not bring the asari here to be your… playmate. She is here for Lord Tolystol!”  
“Aye,” said another. He was dressed much like the first, but in white. “You’ve had your fun, Captain. Don’t risk a deserved reward by getting carried away.”  
Glamis glowered at the two robed drell, but relented to them.  
“Very well,” she said. “But given that it was I who took all the risks, I don’t necessarily begrudge myself a few creature comforts.” She looked over her shoulder at Liara. “Behave, asari. Or my companions here might change their minds about letting me enjoy myself.”

She took long, proud strides as she left the White Room, her hands on her hips, the tails of her long, black coat sweeping imperiously behind her. Just before she left, she shot one last look at Liara, and mouthed a single word to her. She knew the asari had understood, because she flinched at it. It had been the first word she’d spoken to Liara.  
“ _Gotcha_.”

* * *

With Glamis gone, the other drell – six in all – assembled into two rows of three, and stood at attention like human soldiers, waiting silently. None of them so much as looked at Liara; in fact the ones nearest to her seemed to be deliberately looking away.  
“ _What’s… what’s happening now?_ ” Liara thought. She was grateful to have Glamis away from her, and that these other drell weren’t touching her anymore, but she had a presentiment that things were not going to keep improving. The name ‘Lord Tolystol’ meant nothing to her, but it was… ominous. And after everything that had already been done to her, Liara believed that she had no hope even of being courageous now. When whatever happened happened, Liara felt, she would not be able to resist. She would only whimper.

The drell shouted. All at once, a single syllable, so brisk and so quick that Liara wasn’t even sure it had happened until they did it again. Then a third time.  
“Bow!” shouted the drell in the green robe. “Bow for Lord Tolystol!”  
The others obeyed, prostrating themselves on the ground, while the drell in the green robe dropped to one knee.  
Liara was perplexed. She did not know much of the ways of the drell, but she had never had a hint that they ever behaved like this. Their word ‘lord’ wasn’t even a drell word, but an asari one – she had heard them using it even when speaking to each other. What was happening here? Just who had really kidnapped her?

An answer, of a kind, appeared when the door of the white room slid open. Liara began to breathe hard, fearing what might step through. In fact, nothing stepped through at all. As she’d guessed, it was ‘Lord Tolystol’, but Lord Tolystol didn’t walk across the ground. He floated. He was about the size and mass of a small human, but hung in the air, drifting on an unseen force field, his six tendrils drifting lazily between his main body and the ground. He had no face in the way most bipeds did, just a cluster of sense-nerves in a stubby armlike protrusion at his front. He was, in fact, a hanar.

“ **This one thanks the acolytes for their service** ,” he said. “ **They have done a great service for the Loyal.** ”  
The drell did not answer.  
“ **Leave us,** ” Tolystol commanded, and the drell instantly obeyed, filing out with their heads bowed, not allowing themselves to turn their backs.

The hanar drifted over to Liara’s prison, the asari looking at him in utter perplexity. It explained a few things: it explained why drell, who so often worked as servitors of the hanar, had been the ones who’d kidnapped her. It explained how Glamis had had access to such an advanced ship. But – a _hanar_? A culture of such pathological politeness and courtesy that asari had known them to apologize for apologizing too obsequiously – _they_ had abducted her? It was… bizarre.

“ **Doctor T’Soni** ,” Tolystol said. “ **We have followed your career with interest for some years now. We apologize for bringing you into our presence in such a fashion. Alas that it was necessary.** ”  
“Mhh?” What was he talking about? What, he’d read her scholarly works?  
“ **You are not sufficiently respected by your peers,** ” he said. “ **Your work on the history of the Enkindlers is truly visionary. Under different circumstances you would have become one of the finest archaeologists of your time. Alas! Alas!”** he said, making a strange bowing motion with his head-appendage.  
Liara could hardly believe it, but Tolystol had actually proven one of her guesses about the reason for her abduction to be correct. It _was_ a hanar, and they _did_ want her knowledge about the protheans – ‘Enkindlers’ was their reverent name for the long-dead race, whom they believed to have uplifted them from being mere animals. Liara did not fail to notice the way he’d chosen to phrase himself either.  
“‘ _Would have become’?_ _Oh… oh goddess, what is he going to do with me?_ ”

Now that he was closer, hovering above Liara, two of his tendrils raised, the asari found it impossible to find him amusing. A hanar’s tendrils were long, and powerful, and he could throttle the life out of Liara at any moment of his choosing.  
“ **I imagine,** ” he said, “ **that you think the hanar very stupid. We would not blame you. We know our ways seem strange, even backward, to the advancements and the might of the asari. For one as learned as you, it must seem ridiculous that we worship a race that is long dead, that – to you – was no more a race of gods than the turians are**.”

Having this conversation at another moment, Liara might have felt a little guilty. For she had to confess she had sometimes felt the way Tolystol had described, that it was mad superstition for the hanar to treat the protheans as they did, and that despite her best efforts she found them all but incomprehensible. Given, however, that Tolystol had arranged for her abduction, she didn’t feel especially repentant.  
“ **Would it surprise you, asari maiden, to find that this one agrees with you?** ”  
It did. Liara had never met a hanar who was not devout in their worship of the Enkindlers. Their race seemed to go to great effort to present a completely unified front.

“ **There are not many who feel as this one does.** ” His head-appendage drooped, as though in lament. “ **Even to suggest that the Enkindlers – the protheans – had some hand in our ascension to sapience, but that they were not actually gods… it is difficult to find others who will agree among this one’s people. Why, even our loyal servitors,** ” he said, gesturing with one of his rear tendrils towards the door, indicating the absent drell, “ **even they would be aghast to hear this one speak so. But this one does not begrudge the others their faith. This one… this one wishes that it had such faith as well. It is what has held the hanar as one people since the time of Awakening. The hanar have never warred – certainly not with our own people. Our faith in the Enkindlers is the cornerstone of that. Yet this one knows what you know. This one, too, has seen a beacon.** ”

“ _… Oh._ ” The final element of the puzzle clicked into place, the reason that this hanar would go to such great lengths, and risk so much, to have Liara abducted. He’d found out, somehow, about the beacon on Eden Prime – only his information had been faulty. When Shepard had been imprinted with the beacon’s data, she’d sought Liara out because of her expertise. But Tolystol seemed to have got it the wrong way round. He thought that _Liara_ had been imprinted with the beacon. It wasn’t even much of a mistake: through sharing unity with Shepard, Liara had effectively seen the beacon too. And now that she had heard Tolystol’s sentiments, she understood why she was here: Tolystol needed to silence her.

“ **If our people,** ” Tolystol said, holding his foremost tendrils above himself in a gesture of anguish, “ **were to learn that the Enkindlers did not ascend, nor journey to the world beyond, nor leave their children for a quest to the unseen depths of the universe, - if they learned that – that—”** The hanar voice synthesizers did not simulate emotion well, but from the way the hanar was squirming and flashing, Liara could tell he was riven with emotion. “ **If they learned,** ” he continued, “ **that the Enkindlers were _slain_ – murdered, all, simply by a greater power than themselves – the heart of the hanar would break as this one’s has broken. Even if the Enkindlers were not gods, that this holocaust should have happened at all is unbearable!”**

Liara realized that she had never thought of it in this way. She’d taken the destruction of the protheans – a tragedy now fifty-thousand years old, after all – as cold fact for so long, that she had never stopped to think what the effect would be if she proved her theory about the protheans to be true. No, that wasn’t quite true: but she’d thought the effects would all be good, that the galaxy, understanding how the protheans had fallen, would steel themselves against whatever horror it was that had destroyed them. She had never stopped to think about how the hanar, for whom the protheans were, in their way, still very much alive, would be devastated by her proofs. Perhaps it was because Glamis had brought her to such a low ebb; perhaps it was because she was so shaken and so frightened; but she could not find it in herself to be angry with this hanar.

“ **This one must be clear,** ” Tolystol said. “ **This one does not blame you. This one respects the noble endeavour of truth-seeking. But as others battle for their kinds, so must this one for its kind.** ” He raised his frontmost tendrils, and Liara saw he was holding something in one of them, some kind of strange looking device, an obsidian disc, inlaid with markings in a prothean dialect that had never been properly translated. “ **We know much of the Enkindlers** ,” he said, “ **that we keep hidden. You know they possess the power to give knowledge, through the beacons. What you do not know is that they can do the reverse as well – take knowledge, remove it. We do not wish to kill you, Doctor T’Soni, so we must do this.** ”  
“Nhh! Nmmhh-NNMPPHHH!!” Liara began thrashing again, but the tube held her just as fast as it had before. Nothing Tolystol could have threatened her with would have been worse than taking her knowledge from her. And how much would it take? Just what she knew from Shepard’s beacon? What she knew about the protheans’ deaths in general? Or – or _everything_ she knew about them? Her entire career, wiped out? No – death would be better. Better than to annihilate something that was so much a part of what she was. Damn the matriarchs. Damn her mother! The protheans were hers and she couldn’t give them up – she couldn’t, she couldn’t!  
“NMMMMMMMPHHHH!!” she screamed, straining as hard as she possibly could – but she couldn’t get away. Her arms just weren’t strong enough. And the disc that threatened to obliviate her life’s work kept getting closer, and closer, and closer…

And then the lights went out.

“ **What?!** ” Tolystol jerked round, blind, swaying his tendrils wildly. After a few seconds, the red emergency lighting clicked on, but the sudden change in light conditions had been particularly disorienting. As he reeled, the White Room’s door opened, and the drell in the white robe ran in.  
“Forgiveness, Lord!” he said, “but something is wrong. The station’s entire central computer core has been shut down!”  
“ **How?** ” Tolystol’s synthesizer kept him sounding calm, but his flashing, undulating body showed his distress.  
“We don’t know,” the drell replied. “It seems like some kind of cyber-attack. We have countermeasures, but our technicians can’t implement them faster than they’re overridden again.” At the same time, both Tolystol and Liara reached the same conclusion: that the station was under attack. The only difference was that Tolystol arrived at this thought simply with the word ‘rescuers’. Liara arrived at it with a name.  
“ _Tali!_ ”

One by one every circuit, every motherboard, every computer core and every backup computer core, everything that was not essential to keeping the station’s atmosphere going, it all failed, every defence systematically batted aside. In some respects the advancements of the hanar were greater than those of the quarians, as was the case when comparing almost any two civilisations. But when it came to electronic warfare, comparing the hanar to the quarians was like comparing the International Space Station to the _Normandy_.

“ **Find the attackers,** ” Tolystol commanded. “ **Eliminate them. They must not be allowed to rescue the asari. Stop them!** ”  
“Yes sir!”  
Slowly, Tolystol turned back to Doctor T’Soni. He would not have time to be merciful. The knowledge would have to be destroyed one way or another. It was terrible, but it was necessary. He would try to make it quick, at least. But, when he had finished turning, he realized that the assailants had affected his station more seriously than he thought.

Freed from the shackles of the tube she’d been stuffed in, Liara glowed with ethereal radiance, her body cloaked in a shining, midnight blue veil. She hovered in the air, arms outstretched, naked, serene, mighty: asari.  
“I am sorry,” Liara said. “I know you are sincere. But this truth cannot – must not – be suppressed. As you feel you must destroy it, I must defend it.”  
“ **No,** ” Tolystol replied, his body flashing with rage. His arms snapped out like whipcords at Liara, but he wasn’t fast enough. With a wave of her hand, she seized him in her biotic grasp, and slammed him against the ceiling above him. He sank slowly back down, and then collapsed in a heap of flopping tentacles.

“Unnhh…!” Liara had still not fully recovered from the drug. She was weakened by her display of power, and it was difficult to stay on her feet. But she struggled forward, quickly grabbing her discarded coat, and slipping it back on. Barefoot and barelegged, she opened the hatch, peeking outside to see the state of what was going on.

Thankfully, none of the personnel were paying attention to the white room. They were all running away from Liara, towards wherever battle was taking place. At the edge of her senses, Liara could hear gunfire.

She managed to make it almost a hundred metres without running into anyone. Even when she did, it was a technician with his back to her, and she was able to incapacitate him without too much effort. The layout of the station was simple, too. It was easy for her to follow the gunfire, which got louder and louder all the time.

Finally, she came to a sort of atrium, with a holographic fountain, and a wide set of stairs leading down from the door where Liara was standing. At the bottom of the stairs, a wide, flat expanse, probably intended as something like a diplomatic foyer. Liara began to descend, but just as she did, she saw someone running in on the lower level. A batarian – the same batarian who had blindfolded her before.

“ _Asari!_ ” he shouted, immediately firing at her. With great effort, Liara raised a biotic barrier, blocking the bullets, but it took so much effort to maintain that she couldn’t move while she was holding it. She could hear the footsteps behind her, knew what was about to happen, but she just couldn’t move in time to stop Captain Glamis from getting behind her, and pointing his pistol at the back of her head.  
“I thought,” the drell said, “that you’d started to understand the etiquette. Asari are supposed to go _limp_ when they get captured. I’m starting to get _annoyed_ with you, Doctor T’Soni. Surrender, or you die right here, right now.”

  
Clenching her teeth, Liara realized that she had no choice. There was no way she could attack before Glamis shot her. There was nothing she could do. In her mind she could already feel the bite of cord, the humiliation of a blindfold, the sting of sedatives in her neck. Glamis was clever. She’d get her to her ship, or to an escape pod, and Liara would be hers again. A captive again. _Helpless_ again. But she would die if she didn’t obey. She raised her hands and, with tears welling up in her eyes dropped her barrier. When it was gone, she saw the batarian was lying dead on the ground. When Liara saw why, she almost fainted.

She had come. As lithe as a jaguar, as deadly as a viper, Commander Shepard stood at the foot of the staircase, pistol still dissipating heat from the shot that had put down the batarian. There was blood on her, but it was not her own. Her eyes were not just focused, not just intent. They were as Liara had never seen them. They were _cold_.  
“Sh-Shepard,” Liara said, too quietly for her to hear. “Shepard! _Shepar_ – MMPHH!!”  
Glamis had grabbed her, clamping her hand with relish over Liara’s mouth, and once again putting her pistol against her temple.  
“Funny,” the drell shouted. “I feel like we’ve been here before. Have we been here before?”  
“With just one difference,” Shepard said. “This time you’re not on a ship. This time my crew has already overrun this station. This time _my_ ship is hovering right outside and _nothing_ is leaving here without my say-so. Put down the gun. _Now_.”  
  


Glamis hissed, pulling Liara even closer.  
“ _Nothing_ has changed. I have what you want, and I know you won’t harm her. Last time, if you were a really good marksman, you could _maybe_ have got off that shot? This time there’s no way you can be sure of hitting me at this distance!”  
“Who said anything about me hitting you?” Shepard said. She looked past Glamis. “Say hi, Wrex.”  
Glamis remembered him. Remembered the krogan that had almost taken out her ship just by running at it. The krogan who had stood up to devastating heavy weapons fire without getting a scratch. The krogan who, by how he’d looked, would have been able to break her like a twig. She wheeled round and found that, while Urdnot Wrex was many things, ‘standing behind Glamis’ was not one of them.

It was just the opportunity Liara needed. She wrestled herself out of Glamis’ grasp, and before the drell could turn her weapon on her again, she seized her in a crushing biotic grip, crying out with effort, frustration, and not a little satisfaction.  
Glamis stared at her with a frozen scowl, eyes full of shock, and wrath. She yelled fiercely, and struggled in the mass effect field Liara had bound her in, but she was no match for it. Liara held her in it, and stepped forward until their faces were only an inch apart. With all the force she could muster, she hurled Glamis right across the atrium, not only smashing her against the far wall, but leaving her with a twenty foot drop right afterwards that almost broke her neck. But before Liara had done that, she’d given her one parting word.  
“ _Gotcha_.”

Liara stood completely still for a few seconds. Her ears were ringing. She was shaking. She kept expecting to find that she was still drugged, and that she’d wake up bound in Glamis’ lap. But it kept on being real. And when that fact fully impressed itself upon her, she fell to her knees and, swooned.

She wasn’t unconscious for long. Only a few seconds. Only a few seconds before Shepard ran to her. Only a few seconds before, quite like a justicar from one of those old stories, she swept Liara up into her arms, cradling her fallen maiden with strength and gentleness. Only a few seconds before Liara’s eyes fluttered open, and she saw Shepard looking down at her, with a relief at least as intense as Liara’s own.  
“You… came for me,” she whispered.  
“Of course I did,” Shepard replied. “I promised you, remember?”

If she hadn’t been so overwhelmed, if she hadn’t been so exhausted, if the sedative she’d been dosed with hadn’t still been sloshing around in her system, Liara would not have done what she then did. But her hero had come for her, and she lay cradled in her arms, and so Liara wrapped her arms around Shepard’s neck, and she kissed her, and she found to her joy that Shepard, though astonished, reciprocated, before Liara gave in to her exhaustion.

When, later, she awoke in Chakwas’ medical bay, Liara was not sure if the kiss had really happened. It was only much later, when the two made love for the first time, that Liara remembered clearly that it had been.


End file.
